Precipitation, both liquid and solid, is central to the global water/energy cycle through its coupling of clouds, water vapor, atmospheric motion, ocean circulation, and land surface processes. While precipitation is the primary source of freshwater, it also has tremendous socio-economic impacts associated with extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, and landslides. Knowledge of precipitation characteristics from local to global scales is essential for understanding how the Earth system operates under changing climatic conditions and for improved societal applications that range from numerical weather prediction to freshwater resource management.
This session will host papers on all aspects of precipitation, especially contributions in the following four research areas:
1. Precipitation measurements (amount, duration, intensity etc) by ground-based in-situ sensors (e.g., rain gauges, disdrometers); estimation of accuracy of measurements, comparison of instrumentation.
2. Precipitation climatologies at regional to global scales; areal distribution of measured precipitation; classification of precipitation patterns; spatial and temporal characteristics of precipitation; methodologies adopted and their uncertainties; comparative studies.
3. Remote sensing of precipitation (spaceborne, airborne, ground-based, underwater, or shipborne sensors) and retrieval techniques; methodologies to estimate areal precipitation (interpolation, downscaling, combination of measurements and/or estimates of precipitation); methodologies used for the estimation (e.g., QPE), validation, and assessment of error and uncertainty of precipitation as estimated by remote sensors.
4. Contributions to current and future missions, such as the international Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, Atmospheric Observing System (AOS), EUMETSAT Polar System-Second Generation (EPS-SG), Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS), Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS), Earth Clouds, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE), tomorrow.io constellation and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-3 (AMSR-3).