On the Importance of PWV in Detecting Precipitation

Abstract

With a rapid increase in the number of geostationary satellites around the earth's orbit, there has been a renewed interest in using Global Positioning System (GPS) to understand several phenomenon in earth's atmosphere. Such study using GPS devices are popular amongst the remote sensing community, as they provide several advantages with respect to scalability and range of applications. In this paper, we discuss how GPS signals can be used to estimate the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of such precipitable water vapor (PWV) in the atmosphere for the task of rainfall detection. We present a detailed analysis in our dataset of meteorological data of 3 years. Test dataset shows that use of PWV in rainfall detection helps to reduce the false alarm rate by almost 12%.