Raincast – Scientific Evaluation of Future Atmospheric Mission Concepts to Monitor Precipitation

The holistic understanding of the Earth’s water and energy cycle remains one of the grandchallenges that the international scientific community needs to address in the next decade.The Raincast project is a multi-platform and multi-sensor study to address the requirement from theresearch and operational communities for global precipitation measurements. Raincast aims atidentifying and consolidating the science requirements for a satellite mission that couldcomplement the existing space-based precipitation observing system and that could optimallyliaise with efforts currently made by other agencies in this area (especially by NASA andJAXA). Because of the complexity of the cloud and precipitation processes the study capitalizeson the most recent advancement and mission concepts for precipitation observations with state-of-the-art instrumentation (including multi-frequency radars, radar-radiometer synergies, constellations of cubesat radars) and makes full use of the most recent advancements in inversion methods for the estimation of precipitation variables from primary measurements (e.g. latest ice scattering libraries, physical relationships derived by in-situ measurements).