Characterizing Global Precipitation Patterns Using Results from Cloudsat

As one of the most obvious atmospheric components, clouds exert fundamental impacts on the global hydrologic cycle, condensing water vapor and forming precipitation when incorporated with aerosols *^. One of the most important final products-precipitation, however, has been poorly parameterized by the modeling community due to traditional instrumental limitations +. In the project, the researcher is trying to characterize global precipitation patterns using data from the NASA satellite Cloudsat. Moreover, the researcher has decided to eliminate the "possible rain" situations, while including only the "certain rain" and the "certain snow" situations for quality purposes. The researcher finds that the precipitation frequency is consistent with our long-time believed results, while the precipitation intensity is, more or less, contradicting to our conventions. In order to analyze the unusual precipitation intensity over the tropics, two regions of equal size are pick out, and their precipitation probability density functions are given and compared. As a result, the researcher concludes that the precipitation of high intensity (usually in tropics) is severely underestimated by the Cloud Profiling Radar on Cloudsat because of wavelength constraints.