Microwave retrievals of terrestrial precipitation over snow-covered surfaces: A lesson from the GPM satellite

Satellites are playing an ever-increasing role in estimating precipitation over remote areas. Improving satellite retrievals of precipitation requires increased understanding of its passive microwave signatures over different land surfaces. Snow-covered surfaces are notoriously difficult to interpret because they exhibit both emission from the land below and scattering from the ice crystals. Using data from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite, we demonstrate that microwave brightness temperatures of rain and snowfall transition from a scattering to an emission regime from summer to winter, due to expansion of less emissive snow cover. Evidence suggests that the combination of low- (10–19 GHz) and high-frequency (89–166 GHz) channels provides the maximum amount of information for snowfall detection. The results demonstrate that, using a multifrequency matching method, the probability of snowfall detection can even be higher than rainfall—chiefly because of the information content of the low-frequency channels that respond to the (near) surface temperature.