ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-6-5031-2006 Discriminating raining from non-raining clouds at mid-latitudes using multispectral satellite data Nauss T. 1 Kokhanovsky A. A. 2 Laboratory of Climatology and Remote Sensing, University of Marburg, Germany Institute of Remote Sensing, University of Bremen, Germany 01 11 2006 6 12 5031 5036 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/6/5031/2006/acp-6-5031-2006.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/6/5031/2006/acp-6-5031-2006.pdf

We propose a new method for the delineation of precipitation using cloud properties derived from optical satellite data. This approach is not only sufficient for the detection of mainly convective precipitation by means of the commonly used connection between infrared cloud top temperature and rainfall probability but enables the detection of stratiform precipitation (e.g., in connection with mid-latitude frontal systems). The scheme presented is based on the concept model, that precipitating clouds must have both a sufficient vertical extent and large enough droplets. Therefore, we have analysed MODIS scenes during the severe European summer floods in 2002 and retrieved functions for the computation of an auto-adaptive threshold value of the effective cloud droplet radius with respect to the corresponding optical thickness which links these cloud properties with rainfall areas on a pixel basis.

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