Quantitative Precipitation Estimation with Operational Polarimetric Radar Measurements in Southern China: A Differential Phase–Based Variational Approach

Abstract Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) with polarimetric radar measurements suffers from different sources of uncertainty. The variational approach appears to be a promising way to optimize the radar QPE statistically. In this study a variational approach is developed to quantitatively estimate the rainfall rate ( R ) from the differential phase (Φ DP ). A spline filter is utilized in the optimization procedures to eliminate the impact of the random errors in Φ DP , which can be a major source of error in the specific differential phase ( K DP )-based QPE. In addition, R estimated from the horizontal reflectivity factor ( Z H ) is used in the a priori with the error covariance matrix statistically determined. The approach is evaluated by an idealized case and multiple real rainfall cases observed by an operational S-band polarimetric radar in southern China. The comparative results demonstrate that with a proper range filter, the proposed variational radar QPE with the a priori included agrees well with the rain gauge measurements and proves to have better performance than the other three approaches, that is, the proposed variational approach without the a priori included, the variational approach proposed by Hogan, and the conventional power-law estimator-based approach.