Elsa Cattani

CNR-ISAC

Daily time series from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2.0 (ARC2), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) and Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite (TAMSAT) African Rainfall Climatology And Time series version 2 (TARCAT) high-resolution long-term satellite rainfall...

The water cycle is the most essential supporting physical mechanism ensuring the existence of life on Earth. Its components encompass the atmosphere, land, and oceans. The cycle is composed of evaporation, evapotranspiration, sublimation, water vapor transport, condensation, precipitation, runoff, infiltration and percolation, groundwater flow, and...

During recent decades East Africa (EA) and Southern Africa (SA) have experienced an intensification of hydrological hazards, such as floods and droughts, which have dramatically affected the population, making these areas two of the regions of the African continent most vulnerable to these hazards. Thus, precipitation monitoring and the evaluation...

Extreme precipitation heavily affects society and economy in Africa because it triggers natural hazards and contributes large amounts of freshwater. Understanding past changes in extreme precipitation could help us improve our projections of extremes, thus reducing the vulnerability of the region to climate change. Here, we combine high-resolution...

The impacts of hailstorms on human beings and structures and the associated high economic costs have raised significant interest in studying storm mechanisms and climatology, thus producing a substantial amount of literature in the field. To contribute to this effort, we have explored the hail frequency in the Mediterranean basin during the last tw...

This paper describes the Passive microwave Neural network Precipitation Retrieval algorithm for climate applications (PNPR-CLIM), developed with funding from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union. The algorithm has been designed and developed to exploit the two cross-track scanning microwa...

The Africa Rainfall Climatology v2 (ARC2), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) v2, and Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite (TAMSAT) African Rainfall Climatology And Time Series v3 (TARCAT3) satellite rainfall products are exploited to study the spatial and temporal variability of East Africa (EA) rai...

The ARC v2 (Novella and Thiaw 2013), CHIRPS v2 (Funk et al. 2015) , and TARCAT v3 (Maidment et al. 2017) satellite rainfall products are exploited to identify the presence of significant rainfall trend patterns over East Africa (EA) in the period 1983-2017 through the time series of selected rainfall indices from the joint CCI/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert T...

The ARC v2 (Novella and Thiaw, 2013), CHIRPS v2 (Funk et al., 2015) , and TARCAT v3 (Maidment et al., 2017) satellite rainfall products are exploited to study the spatial and temporal variability of East Africa (EA) rainfall between 1983 and 2017 through the time series of selected rainfall indices from the joint CCI/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert Team on Cli...

Rainfall from the October-November-December (OND) short rains season over East Africa (EA, 5S-20N, 28E-52E) were analysed during the 1983-2010 period using state-of-the-art observational datasets. Links among satellite-derived rainfall (Climate Hazards group InfraRed Rainfall with Station data, CHIRPS), sea surface temperature (Hadley Centre Sea ic...

Supplementary material for the journal article "East Africa Rainfall Trends and Variability 1983–2015 Using Three Long-Term Satellite Products" by Cattani et al., 2018

The potential vorticity (PV) anomalies due to the intrusion of dry stratospheric air and those generated by the tropospheric diabatic latent heating are qualitatively analyzed for five Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones (also known as Medicanes or TLCs). Model simulations show the presence of an upper level PV streamer in the early stages of the...

East Africa (EA, 5°S–20°N, 28°E–52°E) is experiencing an extreme interannual variability of its rainfall regime with economic and societal consequences on a population that mainly sustains on rain-fed agriculture. The complexity of the rainfall regime is the result of the overlap of factors ranging from large-scale tropical drivers (including sever...

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date culminating in the high-impact drought of 2010-2011. Long-term monitoring of precipitation is thus essential and satellite-based precipitation products can help in coping with the relatively sparse rain-gauge ground networks of this area of the world. How...

Estimating space-time variability of precipitation is an important task in East Africa, considering the observed increased frequency of extreme events, drought episodes in particular. These events deeply affect the population with implications on agriculture and consequently food security. Daily accumulated precipitation time series from satellite...

The daily accumulated precipitation from two widely used satellite products, the Africa Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2) and TRMM-Multi Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) 3B42 version 7, are exploited to extract the spatial variability and temporal evolution of precipitation over East Africa (EA, - 5°S–20°N, 28°E–52°E) at 0.25° spatial resolution d...

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date, culminated with the high-impact drought in 2010-2011. The frequency and impacts of these extreme events require a continuous monitoring of precipitation, as a key variable for the inclusion of these phenomena in regional climatological studies and their...

East Africa experienced in the 2001 -2011 time period some of the worst drought events to date, culminated with the high-impact drought in 2010-2011. The frequency and impacts of these extreme events require a continuous monitoring of precipitation, as a key variable for the inclusion of these phenomena in regional climatological studies and their...

Identifying deep convection is of paramount importance, as it may be associated with extreme weather that has significant impact on the environment, property and the population. A new method, the Hail Detection Tool (HDT), is described for identifying hail-bearing storms using multi-spectral Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data. HDT was conceived...

GSMaP_MVK v 5.222.1 TRMM 3B42 v 7 PERSIANN CMORPH v 1.0 bias corrected RFE v 2.0 0 400 800 1200 1600 2000 mean annual precipita-on (mm) TAMSAT SATELLITE PRECIPITATION vs GPCC_FD * at 0.5° MONTHLY MEAN ANOMALIES vs GPCC_CLIM at 0.5°

The development phase (DP) of the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility for Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) led to the design and implementation of several precipitation products, after 5 yr (2005–2010) of activity. Presently, five precipitation estimation algorithms based on data from passive microwave and infrared...

The development phase (DP) of the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility for Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) led to the design and implementation of several precipitation products, after 5 yr (2005–2010) of activity. Presently, five precipitation estimation algorithms based on data from passive microwave and infrared...

The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) provides rainfall estimations based on infrared and microwave satellite sensors on board polar and geostationary satellites. The validation of these satellite estimations is performed by the H-SAF Precipitation Product Validation Group (PPVG...

Identifying deep convection is of paramount importance, as it may be associated with extreme weather that has significant impact on the environment, property and the population. A new method, the Hail Detection Tool (HDT), is described for identifying hail-bearing storms using multi-spectral Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data. HDT was conceived...

The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) was established by the EUMETSAT Council on July 3, 2005 and started activity at the official date of September 1, 2005. The Italian Meteorological Service serves as "Host Institute" on behalf of 12 European countries. The Project Plan focuse...

The Water vapor Strong Lines at 183 GHz (183-WSL) algorithm is a method for the retrieval of rain rates and precipitation type classification (convective/stratiform). It exploits the water vapor absorption line observations centered at 183.31 GHz of the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit module B (AMSU-B) and of the Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS) f...

The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) was established by the EUMETSAT Council on 3 July 2005, starting activity on 1 September 2005. The Italian Meteorological Service serves as Leading Entity on behalf of twelve European member countries. H-SAF products include precipitation, s...

The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) was established by the EUMETSAT Council on 3 July 2005, starting activity on 1 September 2005. The Ital-ian Meteorological Service serves as Leading Entity on be-half of twelve European member countries. H-SAF prod-ucts include precipitation...

Extreme rainfall on the Island of Madeira on 20 February 2010 triggered flash floods and mudslides with 45 casualties, 8 missing people, and 100 injured. The NE-moving frontal system originating from a low-pressure center in the Madeira Archipelago is not unusual for the area, but its consequences on the island were rather extreme. The study dwells...

Precipitation is a fundamental component of the water cycle and essential to the biosphere as a primary source of fresh water. It regulates very diverse phenomena as floods and droughts, soil moisture, ocean salinity and atmospheric circulation associated to the release of latent heat. For these reasons in recent years many studies have focused on...

The Mediterranean extreme rainfall events often develop at the end of the warm season when the sea surface temperature is higher than 15°C and the environmental conditions allow for the deepening of convection up to the formation of intense isolated cells and multicellular systems. Although the genesis of these phenomena are connected to the cold f...

Improvements of the 183-WSL retrieval method allow to better describe the precipitating clouds as to rain distribution, type and amount. The 183-WSL method is physically based on the water vapor absorption band at 18331 GHz and retrieves the rain rates upon discriminating the convective/stratiform characteristics of the observed precipitation. The...

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Snowfall detection and measurement represent highly difficult problems in modern hydrometeorology. Ground measurements are complicated due to detection technology limitations, snow drift and accumulation issues, and error definition. The snowfall detection from space is in turn affected by all detection limitations that characterize the measurement...

Two heavy rain events over the Central Mediterranean basin, which are markedly different by genesis, dimensions, duration, and intensity, are analyzed. Given the relative low frequency of this type of severe storms in the area, a synoptic analysis describing their development is included. A multispectral analysis based on geostationary multifrequen...

The relationship between the multi-spectral cloud field characterization from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and the rainfall intensities from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-module B (AMSU-B) data were studied for a convective storm event, which occurred during the first 15 days of June 2007 over the Mediterranean. The c...

The algorithm 183-WSL (Laviola and Levizzani 2008) exploits variations in emitted radiation within the water vapor absorption band at 183.31 GHz due to the extinction by rain drops for the estimation of rainfall rates over ocean and land surfaces. The 183-WSL retrieval scheme infers rain types on the basis of signal extinction associated to the pre...

The identification of precipitation areas by microwave based rain algorithms can be improved by means of cloud classification schemes based on multispectral observations. Several recent studies have demonstrated the potential of cloud microphysical and optical characterization for the improvement of passive microwave rain estimates, especially in d...

In a previous work the relationship between rain area delineation by microwave (MW) channels of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) and the multi-spectral cloud field characterization by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) cloud products was analyzed. Only a small percentage of water clouds were detected as rai...

Aerosol from biomass burning has been shown to strongly modify cloud microphysical properties and cloud lifetime through the so-called “indirect effect.” However, in the case of a lack of wet scavenging, it stays suspended for days to weeks and can be transported to considerable distances within an elevated layer above low-level cloud tops with min...

Recently, numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of cloud microphysical and optical characterization for the improvement of passive microwave rain estimates. The detection and the characterization of clouds by means of VIS-NIR-IR observations nearly coincident in time and space with PMW measurements can strongly support the delineation o...

Rainfall intensity estimates by passive microwave (PMW) measurements from space perform generally better over the sea surface with respect to land, due to the problems in separating true rain signatures from those produced by surfaces having similar spectral behaviour (e.g. snow, ice, desert and semiarid grounds). The screening procedure aimed at r...

Clouds are certainly the major factor regulating the Earth radiation budget. Special attention has been dedicated in the last few years to the cloud interaction with aerosol particles through modelling studies, in situ measurements and remote sensing techniques. The alterations that clouds undertake through the interaction with aerosols may have st...

The key objective of the project "Use of the MSG SEVIRI channels in a combined SSM/I, TRMM and geostationary IR method for rapid updates of rainfall" is the development of algorithms for rapid-update of satellite rainfall estimations at the geostationary (GEO) scale. The new channels available with the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager...

Radiative transfer simulations in the VIS, NIR and IR for a scenario characterized by a stratocumulus cloud deck with and without an overlying biomass burning aerosol layer are carried out. The idea is to evaluate the variations of the radiance data within the satellite channels due to the aerosol presence, and understand the eventual effects on th...

The transition from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)/2 to AVHRR/3 on NOAA polar orbiters was associated with a switching from daylight operations of the 3.7- to 1.6-µm wave band, while retaining 3.7 µm for nighttime operations. Investigations of the daylight applicability of the two channels suggest that the 1.6-µm wave band for...

Multi-spectral data from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra spacecraft are used to derive cloud optical thickness and effective particle radius using the algorithm of Nakajima and Nakajima (1995). Microphysical cloud properties are retrieved during strong aerosol events from biomass burning to better underst...

Various types of aerosols affect cloud microphysical properties and cloud lifetime through the so-called “indirect effect”. The decrease of particles size when the cloud is polluted by small aerosol particles serving

A methodology for the retrieval of cloud properties from multi-spectral satellite measurements was developed and its application to measurements from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra and Aqua spacecrafts was shown by Costa et al. (2003, 2004). Cattani et al. (2003) successfully compared the retrieved cloud...

Clouds are one of the main regulating factors of the Earth's climate through scattering and absorption of solar radiation as well as emission and absorption of thermal radiation. In consequence, the study of cloud properties is extremely important for understanding their role in climate change mechanisms. Specifically, aerosol particles, natural or...

The sensors in the infrared, near infrared and visible of polar orbiting and geostationary satellites have entered a new era where the number of channels and the data availability is greater than ever. The use of data from these channels is not anymore confined to the attribution of rainfall levels to cloud top brightness temperature fields as an i...

Cirrus clouds often form on top of intense convective storms and influence the radiation exchange at the top of the atmosphere. From time to time these cirrus assume a typical plume form, whose origin is yet to be clearly explained. Investigation on plume's structure and composition is necessary using satellite observations and radiative transfer m...

¶Cirrus clouds often form above intense convective storms due to several different mechanisms and affect the radiation field at the top of the atmosphere. Radiative transfer computations are performed to characterize these effects within the spectral bands of METEOSAT Second Generation’s (MSG) Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI)....

Multi-spectral data from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra spacecraft are used to derive cloud optical thickness and effective particle radius using the algorithm of Nakajima and Nakajima (1995). Microphysical cloud properties are retrieved during strong aerosol events from biomass burning to better underst...