S-Pol TRMM-LBA Brazil 1999

Quick-Look Images: Limited Demo

Days Available

All days/times are in UTC.

Some things to look for:

Precipitation typically is evident during the early UTC hours (this is the finish of the previous afternoon's convection), tapering to nearly nothing by 0400 UTC (midnight, local). Convection again builds in the afternoon, beginning around 1500 UTC. A more monsoonal regime is evident on 26-Feb and 27-Feb.

Bird Bursts occur fairly regularly. The burst produces a ring-shaped echo in the radar display as over-nighting birds leave their roosting site and radiate outward to begin the days' activity. This happens at about local sunrise on clear mornings (on cloudy mornings, the departure from the roosting area is probably more diffuse). For S-Pol in TRMM, local sunrise is at about 10:00 UTC; roosting site is at about 10° azimuth, 40 km range. Days with obvious bird bursts are noted in the list, below.

Sunrise appears as one or two beams of microwave energy with above-noise-floor power. The sunrise appears in the scans nearest to 1005 UTC, at an azimuth between 100° to 110° (depending upon the date).

The following days of S-Pol imagery are available from this document:

• 21-Jan-1999 (bird burst)
• 25-Feb-1999
• 26-Feb-1999

Information Available

• S-Pol in TRMM-LBA
• What All This Is
• Notes About Data and Data Quality
• User Hints
• Hardware & Software Requirements
• Reviewing MPEG Movies
• GIF Image Control for these Pages
• Bird Bursts and Sunrise, an example
• Photo Gallery
• Whom to Contact
• Credits and Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Redistribution of Images, Use of Code

Information Updates (on the Web)

• ATD S-Pol TRMM-LBA site
• NASA TRMM home page
• NASA TRMM Data Center