MICRAdria is the Microwave-Infrared Combined Rainfall Algorithm (MICRA) implemented for the AdriaRadNet project. MICRAdria provides the following products:

• the estimated Surface Rain Intensity (SRI) [mm/h]
• the standard deviation of the estimated SRI [mm/h]

The latter gives a measure of the estimate confidence: the higher the std(SRI) the lower confidence is given to the estimated SRI.

IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS:

MICRA (Marzano et al., TGRS 2004) combines the appealing coverage and spatial/temporal resolution of geostationary infrared (GEO-IR) observations with rain rate estimates from a higher accuracy source with limited spatial/temporal resolution and coverage.
In the implementation for the AdriaRadNet project, a weather radar network is chosen as the higher-accuracy/lower-coverage source. This procedure is called MICRAdria.
MICRAdria (Cimini et al., ERAD 2014) consists in a background process and a foreground process.
During the background process, the latest nearly-simultaneous SRI product from the weather radar network and GEO-IR observations (brightness temperatures (BT) taken from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG)) are spatially collocated. The set of SRI-BT matchups is used to calibrate a SRI-BT relationship through a statistical integration technique, i.e. the Multiple Univariate Probability Matching (MUPM).
During the foreground process, the SRI-BT relationship is applied to estimate SRI from MSG BT over the entire Adriatic domain, extending the SRI estimate beyond the weather radar network coverage.
The process is iterated every time step (30 minutes) and it is continuously ongoing, ingesting new radar SRI and GEO-IR BT data at every time step.

REFERENCES:

• Cimini D., Di Fabio S., Picciotti E., Bernardini L., Vulpiani G., Montopoli M., Romano F., Marzano F. S.: Synergy of ground-based weather radar network and geostationary satellite observations for extending rain rate estimation beyond radar coverage. Proc. European RADar Conference (ERAD), 2014.
• Marzano, F. S., M. Palmacci, D. Cimini, G. Giuliani and J. F. Turk: Multivariate Statistical Integration of Satellite Infrared and Microwave Radiometric Measurements for Rainfall Retrieval at the Geostationary Scale. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 42, n. 5, pp. 1018-1032, 2004.