S. Archana ¹, G. A. Shanmugha Sundaram ²

Affiliations
1 Center for Excellence in Computational Engineering and Networking, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore 641 – 112, Tamil Nadu, IN
2 Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore 641 – 112, Tamil Nadu, IN

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study about detection of Nimbostratus clouds. In recent days the detection of clouds producing precipitation is very necessary for climate research and weather forecasting. Nimbostratus clouds are thick, dark clouds which produces heavy intensity rain. Precipitable Water Vapour (PWV) is a key element which influences atmospheric conditions but is difficult to measure. This study involves the estimation of PWV using temperature and vapour pressure. The brightness temperature observations from 6.7μm water vapour channel are used to calculate the PWV. GRIDSAT data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre is also used in this analysis. The variation of PWV for Nimbostratus clouds for a period May-December 2014 is studied in this paper. The analysis of the results obtained from the proposed method shows that, the Nimbostratus clouds have high PWV values.

Keywords

Brightness Temperature, Nimbostratus, Precipitable Water Vapour, Upper Tropospheric Humidity

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