Development and Application of a Visible–Infrared Rain Flag for Scatterometer Data

The authors report on characteristics of a rain flag derived from collocation of visible and infrared image data with rain rates over the North Atlantic Ocean obtained from microwave imagery (SSM/I) during a 3-week period (15 October 1996–2 November 1996). The rain flag has been developed as part of an effort to provide an indication of contamination by heavy rainfall in NASA scatterometer datasets. The primary results of this analysis indicate 1) that a simple albedo/infrared brightness temperature threshold is capable of flagging most of the heavy rainfall, though with a fairly high rate of false alarms, and 2) that the small difference in optimal threshold between the Tropics and midlatitudes can probably be ignored. Use of the rain flag in 12 assimilation experiments during this period showed that the number of rain-flagged wind vector cells is generally less than 1% of the number of cells. Overall, the impact from using the rain-flagged data is generally less than 5 m s−1and localized (less than 5° of latitude and longitude). However, in some cases, the effect of excluding just one to five rain-flagged points can change the resulting analysis significantly, because their placement is critical for defining the flow along a front or some other shear-dominated environment.