Monitoring of Rainfall Integrating Active and Passive Microwave Sensors: Possibilities and Problems

The systematic utilisation of surface-based radar data to calibrate and validate satellite based (i.e. SSM/I) passive microwave rainfall algorithms over land is reported. A review of integration problems is considered. The carried out analysis showed that a local scale active microwave data may be used, in a local scale, to provide: useful information to face the beam-filling problem, which affects satellite measurements, and important characteristics of cloud structure in order to facilitate the inversion of passive microwave signatures.