Precipitation Intensity and Cloud Physics

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Precipitation IntensityandCloud Physics

• Brad Eck
• April 26, 2007

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Data Sources

• Precipitation Intensity
• North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR)
• netCDF (thanks to Cedric)
• Units kg/m2/s ? mm/s
• Cloud Physics
• Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS)
• Optical Thickness

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Optical Thickness

• a measure of how opaque a medium is to
  radiation passing through it. http//scienceworld
  .wolfram.com/physics/OpticalDepth.html
• The (dimensionless) line integral of the
  absorption coefficientalong any path in a
  medium.
• http//amsglossary.allenpress.com/glossary/search
  ?idoptical-thickness1

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Source King et. al., Remote sensing of cloud,
aerosol, and water vapor properties from the
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer
(MODIS), IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 30,
2-27 (1992).
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Sprechen Sie Englisch?

• Optical thickness combines droplet size, water
  content and cloud height to give a normalized
  cloud size
• Bigger clouds should have a higher precipitation
  intensity

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May 2006