Satellite precipitation retrievals are fundamentally under-constrained, requiring either implicit or explicit a priori information to constrain the solutions. This a-priori information, however, can also either mask or exaggerate changes in the true rainfall. The talk will review the current state of the global water and energy budgets, and focus on understanding the impact of assumptions in our retrieval schemes, and developing experiments that can shed light upon them. Using information from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the planned Global Precipitation Measurement mission, the talk will compare retrieved cloud profile information to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ‘first guess’ and ‘analysis’ as a way to examine the root causes in the difference maps.

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Christian Kummerow is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science and the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University. His work focuses on understanding the global water cycle and how climate change may or may not impact the availability of water, and determining global precipitation and its physical characteristics as seen from space and the ground. Prior to joining Colorado State University, he spent 13 years at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and served as the NASA Project Scientist for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. Dr. Kummerow received an A.B. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Minnesota in 1987.