Improvement of Cold Season Land Precipitation Retrievals Through The Use Of WRF Simulations and High Frequency Microwave Radiative Transfer Model

As we move from the TRMM to GPM era, more emphasis will be placed on a larger regime of precipitation in mid- and high-latitudes, including light rain, mixed-phase precipitation and snowfall. In these areas, a large and highly variable portion of the total annual precipitation is snow. There is a wealth of observational evidence of brightness temperature depression from frozen hydrometeor scattering at the high frequency from aircraft and spacecraft microwave instruments. Research on the development of snowfall retrieval over land has become increasing important in the last few years (Chen and Staelin, 2003; Kongoli et al., 2004; Skofronick-Jackson et al., 2004, Noh et al., 2006; Aonashi et al., 2007; Liu, 2008; Grecu and Olson, 2008; Kim et al., 2008). However, there is still a considerable amount of work that needs to be done to develop global snowfall detection and retrieval algorithms. This paper describes the development and testing of snowfall models and retrieval algorithms using WRF snowfall simulations and high frequency radiative transfer models for snowfall events took place in January 2007 over Ontario, Canada.