UNCERTAINTY IN VERTICALLY INTEGRATED LIQUID WATER-CONTENT DUE TO RADAR REFLECTIVITY OBSERVATION ERROR

Radar reflectivity is used to estimate meteorological quantities such as rainfall rate, liquid water content, and the related quantity, vert ically integrated liquid (VIL) water content. The estimation of any of these quantities depends on several assumptions related to the charac teristics of the physical processes controlling the occurrence and cha racter of water in the atmosphere. Additionally, there are many source s of error associated with radar observations, such as those due to br ightband, hail, and drop size distribution approximations. This work a ddresses one error of interest, the radar reflectivity observation err or; other error sources are assumed to be corrected or negligible. The result is a relationship between the uncertainty in VIL water content and radar reflectivity measurement error. An example application illu strates the estimation of VIL uncertainty from typical radar reflectiv ity observations and indicates that the coefficient of variation in VI L is much larger than the coefficient of variation in radar reflectivi ty.