The new French operational radar rainfall product. Part I: Methodology

A new radar-based rainfall product has been developed at Meteo-France and is currently being deployed within the French operational Application Radar a la Meteorologie Infra-Synoptique (ARAMIS) radar network. The rainfall product is based entirely on radar data and comprises the following successive processing steps: 1) dynamic identification of ground clutter based on the pulse-to-pulse fluctuation of the radar signal, 2) reflectivity-to-rain-rate conversion using the Marshall-Palmer Z-R relationship, 3) correction for partial beam blocking using numerical simulations of the interaction between the radar wave and the terrain, 4) correction for vertical profile of reflectivity (VPR) effects based on ratio curves and a priori climatology-based VPR candidates, 5) correction for nonsimultaneity of radar measurements by making use of a cross-correlation advection field, 6) weighted linear combination of the corrected reflectivity measurements gathered at the various elevation angles of the volume coverage pattern, and 7) production of a 5-min rain accumulation using the advection field to mitigate undersampling effects. In addition to the final Cartesian, 512 km x 512 km, 1 km(2) in resolution, radar rainfall product, a map of quality indexes is automatically generated that allows for assessing empirically the accuracy of the estimation. This new product has been validated using 27 episodes observed during the autumns of 2002 and 2003 and the winter of 2005 by three S-band radars of the network. This paper is entirely devoted to the description of the methodology.