Can GPS RO water vapor information be used to reproduce precipitation patterns ? 3rd International Conference on GPS Radio Occultation

ALEXANDER, P.; DE LA TORRE, A.; LLAMEDO, P.; HIERRO, R.; YEN, N.

Taipei

Conferencia; 3rd International Conference on GPS Radio Occultation; 2016

SouthAmerica (SA) orography is characterized by the presence of the Andes range, whichextends along about 7,000 km with tops of around 6-7 km close to the west coast.This mountain range, nearly aligned in North-South direction, strongly affectsthe behavior of the troposphere flow and therefore determines meteorologicalevents. The presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is another importantfeature which influences the meteorology of the region. In mid-latitudes,predominant westerly winds give place to the income of moist air from thePacific Ocean, which is blocked by the mountains. Close to the equator, moistflow from the Atlantic is introduced into the continent from the East, thereafterit reaches the Andes on the West and it is then directed towards the South. Asa result, SA alternates wet areas as the Amazon basin with dry ones, as theAtacama desert or the Patagonia. Precipitation in SA is also influenced by thepresence of the oceans and the Andes range. As the oceanic region lacksinformation from radiosonde data, COSMIC data have demonstrated to be a usefultool for the estimation of prevailing fields in the lower atmosphere at the regionalscale. In this work, we apply a principal component analysis to show that theCOSMIC water vapor profiles can reproduce the precipitation patterns over SA(from another data source), as they exhibit most of the observed rainfall variabilityduring the 2006-2013 years. Thus COSMIC water vapor profiles may be used asproxy data for rainfall over the studied region.