Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: optimized processing and validation for 1 year of data

Graf, Maximilian; Chwala, Christian; Polz, Julius; Kunstmann, Harald

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2931-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2931-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2931-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

Research article

|

04 Jun 2020

Research article |

| 04 Jun 2020

Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: optimized processing and validation for 1 year of data

Maximilian Graf, Christian Chwala, Julius Polz, and Harald Kunstmann

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Final revised paper (published on 04 Jun 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Aug 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of paper "Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: Optimized processing and validation for one year of data"', Anonymous Referee #1, 09 Sep 2019
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Maximilian Graf, 29 Nov 2019
RC2: 'Review summary: "Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: Optimized processing and validation for one year of data"', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Oct 2019
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', Maximilian Graf, 29 Nov 2019
RC3: 'Review on ''Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: Optimized processing and validation for one year of data''', Anonymous Referee #3, 24 Oct 2019
- AC3: 'Response to RC3', Maximilian Graf, 29 Nov 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (30 Nov 2019) by Nadav Peleg

AR by Maximilian Graf on behalf of the Authors (31 Jan 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Feb 2020) by Nadav Peleg

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of revised version and rebuttal of paper "Rainfall estimation from a German-wide commercial microwave link network: Optimized processing and validation for one year of data" written by Graf et al.

General assessment
The authors have taken my comments into account very well and modified the manuscript accordingly, e.g. by including additional analyses. I appreciate the openness of the authors on some errors in their processing, which they found, and for updating their manuscript using the corrected processing. I only have some minor comment, but there is no need to send me the manuscript again.

Minor comments
• Page 2, lines 15-16: I think that for precipitation products from GEO satellites the spatial resolution can be comparable with LEO satellites (e.g. ~10-20 km2 for MSG SEVIRI and ~25 km2 for the precipitation radar of GPM), but that the main limitation is that precipitation retrieval from GEO satellites is rather indirect from visible and infrared channels, whereas LEO satellites usually employ a microwave radiometer, and a radar in case of the GPM core satellite.
• Page 4, line 16: replace “data sets” by “data set”.
• Page 5, line 9: replace “results” by “result”.
• Although in Section 2.2. it is clearly stated that 1-minute instantaneous data are employed, it could be stated more clearly that in the entire processing chain from Section 3.2.2. up to and including Section 3.2.4, always 1-minute data are used.
• Page 9, line 3: replace “to often” by “too often”.
• Page 10, line 2: replace “each CMLs location” by either “each CML location” or “each CML’s location”.
• Page 11, line 11: replace “this values” by “this value”.
• Page 16, line 24: replace “criteria is set” by “criterion is set”.
• Page 16, line 25: replace “the performance measure get worse” by “the performance measure gets worse” or “the performance measures get worse”.
• Page 16, line 28: replace “with this thresholds” by “with these thresholds”.
• Page 18, line 14: replace “CMLs path” by “CML path”.
• Page 19, caption Figure 7: replace “A coverage mask is” by “A coverage mask of”.
• Page 19, line 10: replace “summery” by “summer”.
• Pages 20/21, caption Figures 8/9: add “hourly” to “path-averaged rainfall along”.
• Page 22: line 14: replace “krigging” by “kriging”.
• Perhaps I missed it, but is the TSL (nearly) constant, or is Automatic Transmit Power Control (ATPC) employed? I don’t expect any influence on the results for this instantaneously sampled dataset, but it could be interesting to add this information.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Apr 2020)

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (06 Apr 2020) by Nadav Peleg

AR by Maximilian Graf on behalf of the Authors (21 Apr 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Apr 2020) by Nadav Peleg

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (30 Apr 2020)

ED: Publish as is (01 May 2020) by Nadav Peleg

Short summary

Commercial microwave links (CMLs), which form large parts of the backhaul from the ubiquitous cellular communication networks, can be used to estimate path-integrated rainfall rates. This study presents the processing and evaluation of the largest CML data set to date, covering the whole of Germany with almost 4000 CMLs. The CML-derived rainfall information compares well to a standard precipitation data set from the German Meteorological Service, which combines radar and rain gauge data.