Determination of low-level temperature profiles from microwave radiometer observations during rain

Abstract. Usually, microwave radiometer observations have to be discarded during rain. The radomes of the receiver antenna get wet, which hampers accurate measurements since the retrieval algorithms to derive atmospheric quantities are not trained for rain events. The reason for the latter is, that the raindrops dominate the microwave signal compared to the weaker signal from atmospheric gases. To account for this, radiative transfer simulations need to include the electromagnetic properties of rain, which usually requires more complicated and expensive simulations. In this work, the performance of newly developed microwave radiometer retrievals that are not based on rain simulations is evaluated to assess how they work during rain events. It is shown that it is possible to retrieve low-level temperature profiles during rain by omitting certain frequencies and zenith observations. Retrievals with various combinations of elevation angles and frequencies are evaluated. We show that retrievals based on scanning mode observations with angles below 30° without zenith observation and only the less transparent upper four HATPRO microwave radiometer frequencies of the V-band (54.94, 56.66, 57.3, 58 GHz) provide the best results. An analysis of the calculated degrees of freedom of the signal shows that the retrieval of temperature profiles up to 3 km for no rain, 1.5 km for light to moderate rain, and 1 km for very heavy rain is driven by the HATPRO observation and not by climatology. Finally, the performance of the temperature profile retrieval is explained using a case study in Lindenberg, Germany, and evaluated with temperature profiles from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model for different rainfall intensities. The results show that the higher the rainfall rate, the larger the deviation of the retrieved microwave radiometer temperature profile from the ECMWF model output. The proposed retrievals for temperature profiles up to at least 1.5 km for rain rates below 0.5 and below 2.5 mm h−1 have uncertainties of less than 1 and 2 K, respectively, compared to ECMWF model output profiles.