Prove it! ARM’s Progress Towards a Suite of Verified Precipitating Cloud System Retrievals.

Description

Radars do not measure geophysical parameters. Rather, they measure the interaction of the electromagnetic field with a scattering medium. Using models of this interaction and making assumptions to render the problem tractable a comprehensive list of precipitating cloud system properties can be retrieved. However, due to the complex and highly non-linear nature of the scattering robust verification of the retrievals is required in order to prove (or disprove) the trustworthiness of the technique and ensure that the final Value Added Products (VAPS) being delivered to the ARM Community are of the highest standard. This presentation will detail some of the retrieval techniques and work towards establishing the veracity of the final product using independent data sources. It will cover the full set of available evaluation products from the Multi-Frequency (0.915 to 6.25GHz) precipitation sensitive radar network including planned VAPS. The presentation will also briefly detail the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) which is an open community based architecture used to perform the retrievals.