In collaboration with RSD, The Hurricane Research Division (HRD) at AOML conducts research that attempts to provide fields of rainfall accumulation over Florida Bay and the Everglades using National Weather Services WSR-88D in South Florida in support of the Florida Bay Program.
The freshwater input from precipitation, directly, and through flows resulting from over-land rain, is a vital parameter in many analyses; e.g., salinity studies, ecological studies, and hydrological and ecological modeling of Florida Bay. Because of the tropical convective nature of the summer rainfall in South Florida, gage measurements of rainfall only provide representative rainfall for long averaging periods and often miss significant convective rainfall events. Thus, radar is a powerful tool for rain flux measurement, but the algorithms must be tuned for the tropical rain drop size distributions in South Florida. As a result, RSD has constructed and operates a disdrometer site in the Everglades to measure the drop size distribution.
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