Correction of three-dimensional effects for passive microwave remote sensing of convective clouds

This paper presents a simple approach to adjust microwave brightness temper ature distributions obtained from slant-path measurements for projection ef fects. Horizontal displacement in the direction of sight is caused by signa l contributions from other than near-surface layers that are projected to t he footpoint of observation. In particular at frequencies sensitive to ice particle scattering the horizontal projection effect can amount to values a s big as the vertical cloud extent. Based on cloud model-generating, three- dimensional hydrometeor distributions at subsequent model time steps and a modified one-dimensional radiative transfer model, the high correlation of effective radiance contribution altitudes and brightness temperatures at 37 .0 and 85.5 GHz is demonstrated. For these altitudes, described by the cent ers of gravity of the spectral weighting functions, regression equations ar e derived with standard errors below 0.61 km at 85.5 GHz and 0.22 km at 37. 0 GHz for both the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and Tropical Rai nfall Measurement Mission Microwave Imager. Once the centers of gravity are retrieved a simple geometry correction can be applied to the measurements. Application to model cloud fields at various time steps and different obers ervation geometries shows a significantly improved correspondence of bright ness temperature and hydrometeor distributions. This method is also applied to SSM/I observations during the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment in the equatorial Pacific. Considerabl e improvements of single-channel rain retrievals based on 85.5-GHz measurem ents compared to shipborne radar data were achieved, which suggests that a major uncertainty of so-called scattering algorithms can be explained by ge ometry effects that can be easily corrected. Multichannel algorithms, howev er, require a more elaborate integration scheme to allow for both frequency and scene-dependent adjustments.