REMOTE SENSING OF RAINFALL PARAMETERS BY LASER SCINTILLATION CORRELATION METHOD -NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE RETRIEVING

This paper is a continuation of an earlier paper. In this paper, we investigate the stability and the representativeness of the rainfall rate h determined by the B2*-h relationship in the scintillation method of remote sensing of rain parameters, develop an adequate scheme for retrieving rainfall rate and raindrop size distribution (DSD), and finally characterize the technique by numerical simulations. The results show that the B2*-h relationship is quite stable for all the raindrop size distributions used in present simulations; the measured rainfall rate is not severely affected by the distribution of the path-weighting function of B2*. The retrieving of DSDs is successful even if the observation errors are assumed in simulations. The rainfall rates derived from the ratrieving of DSD is more accurate than those determined by B2*-h relationship. This method is superior in heavier rains.