Project Statement
The Light Precipitation Evaluation Experiment (LPVEx) will take place in September and October 2010 in the Gulf of Finland to characterize the ability of CloudSat, the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR), and existing/planned passive microwave (PMW) sensors such as the GPM microwave imager (GMI) to detect light rain and evaluate their estimates of rainfall intensity in high latitude, shallow freezing level environments. The experiment will leverage in situ microphysical property measurements, coordinated remote sensing observations, and cloud resolving model simulations of high latitude precipitation systems to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of precipitation algorithms for current and future satellite platforms. The campaign will also seek to use these measurements to better understand the process of light rainfall formation at high latitudes and augment the currently limited database of light rainfall microphysical properties that form the critical assumptions at the root of satellite retrieval algorithms.