[11-Nov-2014] Santos-Garcia, A., Jacob, M., and Jones, L.
Presented at the 2014 Aquarius/SAC-D Science Team MeetingThe influence of precipitation on the sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements is an important issue for users of the Aquarius data (AQ L2) as discussed in a companion paper. This poster presents a new ancillary Rain Accumulation (RA) data product developed by the Central FL Remote Sensing Lab that integrates the collocated precipitation with the AQ Level 2 (L2) science dataset. We use the NOAA precipitation product CMORPH (Climate Prediction Center ? Morphing Technique) that has a global coverage between ?60° latitude, a spatial resolution of 0.2425° and a sampling window of 30 minutes. In addition to the instantaneous rain rate, this overlay product to the AQ L2 science data provides rain accumulation for the previous 24 hours in time steps of 30 minutes. The spatial integration of the precipitation product over the AQ IFOV is performed using the weighted average based on the antenna beam efficiency. The purpose of this poster is to describe the RA product and to present validation results using independent environmental data records (EDR) WindSat rain retrievals. The WindSat EDR's have a large number of rain event collocations (<30 min) with the AQ observation.