The use of satellite data in rainfall monitoring

The invitation to prepare a book concerned with the use of satellites in monitoring rainfall came unexpectedly. The proposal, however, was of immediate interest because of our long involvement in this field of enquiry, our complementary concerns with different methods and types of applications, and our judgment that an overview of progress in monitoring rainfall from satellite observations is needed. In writing this volume we have attempted to summarize present methods designed to augment conventional rainfall data using satellites to provide information on rainfall occurrence, rate, amount, and distribution; to denote primary uses ofsuch methods in meteorology, climatology, hydrology, and allied environmental sciences; and to examine the prospects for obtaining still further improved rainfall data in the future, especially through new technological developments, improvements in interrelations between different types of observational networks, and better data processing and analysis. It is our hope that this book will be of interest and value to many scientists-both pure and applied-whose subjects involve in some direct or indirect way questions in the realm of rainfall hydrometeorology. In preparing it, we have tried less to be exhaustive in our review of the literature than to identify the more significant work which has been undertaken, and reported mostly in the refereed literature; we have tried to provide the readers with that critical synthesis of the field which we believe is necessary at this time. In order to ensure th at the book will be of interest and help to many for whom satellite methods might be of real practical significance, but for whom satellite meteorology is a relatively unfamiliar field, we have set our critical review of methods and applications of satellites in rainfall monitoring within a framework of basic facts and principles. Thus, it is our hope that, as a texbook of science, this book will be seen by all to be suitably self-explanatory and self-contained; we also hope that, as a report and discussion of research and research results, it will be seen by all to be fair to the work which has been done in its fields, and that it may go on to be seminal to some of what is yet to come.