TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jacobi, Stephan
A1  - Heistermann, Maik
T1  - Benchmarking attenuation correction procedures for six years of single-polarized C-band weather radar observations in South-West Germany
JF  - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology
N2  - Rainfall-induced attenuation is a major source of underestimation for radar-based precipitation estimation at C-band. Unconstrained gate-by-gate correction procedures are known to be inherently unstable and thus not suited for unsupervised attenuation correction. In this study, we evaluate three different procedures to constrain gate-by-gate attenuation correction using reflectivity as the only input. These procedures are benchmarked against rainfall estimates from uncorrected radar data, using six years of radar observations from the single-polarized C-band radar in South-West Germany. The precipitation estimation error is obtained by comparing the radar-based estimates to rain gauge observations. All attenuation correction procedures benchmarked in this study lead to an effective improvement of precipitation estimation. The first method caps the corrections if the rain intensity increase exceeds a factor of two. The second method decreases the parameters of the attenuation correction iteratively for every radar beam calculation until attaining a stability criterion. The second method outperforms the first method and leads to a consistent distribution of path-integrated attenuation along the radar beam. As a third method, we propose a slight modification of Kraemer's approach which allows users to exert better control over attenuation correction by introducing an additional constraint that prevents unplausible corrections in cases of dramatic signal losses.
KW  - Weather radar
KW  - attenuation
KW  - quantitative precipitation estimation
KW  - heavy rainfall
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/19475705.2016.1155080
SN  - 1947-5705
SN  - 1947-5713
VL  - 7
SP  - 1785
EP  - 1799
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -