The Assessment of Ground-Based Weather Radar Data by Comparison With TRMM PR

Abstract

The Precipitation Radar (PR) on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite has already provided reliable observations for more than 15 years. There is a potential possibility to assess long-term data of ground-based radar (GR) in the China new generation weather radar network through comparison between PR and GR. In this letter, stratiform precipitation above and below bright bands is used to implement reflectivity comparison for PR and the ground-based weather radar in Nanjing from 2003 to 2014. The results show that the accuracy of GR reflectivity is well correlated with the distance from GR, and there are several unusual years in which GR did not work properly. The comparison also indicates that bias of reflectivity between PR and GR is negative above bright bands but positive below bright bands, and the bias has high correlation with GR reflectivity. The proposed scheme provides a practical method for a sanity check of GR data.