Potential Impact of RainCube-like radars in CubeSats for Cloud and Precipitation Space Missions
Abstract
Since its launch in May 2018, RainCube (Radar in a CubeSat) has joined the fleet of spaceborne cloud and precipitation (C&P) profiling radars, which consists of a) NASA/CSA's CloudSat (launched in 2006), and b) NASA/JAXA's Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) Dual Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR, launched in 2012) radars. In addition to being the most recent C&P radar, RainCube (Ka band, nadir) is also much smaller than CloudSat (W-band, nadir) and GPM-DPR (Ku&Ka, scanning). Indeed RainCube, built on a 6U CubeSat, is a technology demonstration to establish the capability of Ka-band precipitation radar technologies on low-cost platforms. RainCube is the first C&P radar to be operated in space on such platform class [1].
We will present the large variety of storms that have been observed by RainCube and show its high capability in capturing the spatial structure of clouds and precipitation, including isolated convection. We will then discuss how we used co-located RainCube and GPM-DPR measurements (Ka-band) to successfully validate the calibration of RainCube. These co-located analyses have shown the high merit of radars in CubeSats and the complementarity between the observations of RainCube's nadir-looking instrument and GPM-DPR's scanning radar. Our results will also illustrate the advantage of having multiple and frequent radar observations of the same atmospheric scene to properly capture the evolution of atmospheric dynamics [2]. Such observations, from low-Earth orbit, are only feasible (to date) through a constellation of RainCube-like radars, or by launching a single larger instrument (such as GPM-DPR, with e.g. scanning, polarimetry, Doppler capability) together with a ``swarm'' of smaller RainCube-like radars [3]. References [1] E. Peral et al., "Radar Technologies for Earth Remote Sensing From CubeSat Platforms," in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 404-418, March 2018. [2] Stephens, G.L., S.C. van den Heever, Z.S. Haddad, D.J. Posselt, R.L. Storer, L.D. Grant, O.O. Sy, T.N. Rao, S. Kumar, S. Tanelli, and E. Peral, 2019: A distributed small satellite approach for measuring convective transport in the Earth's atmosphere. In press at IEEE [3] O. O. Sy, Z. S. Haddad, G. L. Stephens and S. Hristova-Veleva, "Derived Observations From Frequently Sampled Microwave Measurements of Precipitation. Part II: Sensitivity to Atmospheric Variables and Instrument Parameters," in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 2898-2912, May 2017- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A43F..02S
- Keywords:
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- 0399 General or miscellaneous;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 1699 General or miscellaneous;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 7599 General or miscellaneous;
- SOLAR PHYSICS;
- ASTROPHYSICS;
- AND ASTRONOMY;
- 7899 General or miscellaneous;
- SPACE PLASMA PHYSICS