Improved Passive Microwave Retrievals of Rain Rate over Land and Ocean. Part II: Validation and Intercomparison

A new passive microwave rainfall retrieval algorithm for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) that relies on an a priori database derived from matchups between TMI brightness temperatures and precipitation radar (PR)-derived surface rain rates has been developed. In addition to implementing a fairly conventional Bayesian approach to precipitation estimation, it exploits a dimensional reduction technique designed to increase the effective sample density in the database and also to improve the detectability of precipitation over problem surface types. The details of the algorithm itself are described in a companion paper. In this paper, the algorithm is validated against independent PR-TMI matchups from calendar year 2002. The validation results are benchmarked against results obtained for the same scenes from the current standard (version 7) 2A12 rainfall product for TRMM.