Synergetic use of METEOSAT 8 data and Radar products

Satellite and radar products are important data sources for operational meteorology. They provide information to monitor numerical weather model behaviour. In many cases comparing them to each other validates their products. In the comparison, however, one of them is accepted as providing the ‘truth’, despite known deficiencies.

This paper proposes a synergetic use of both different remote sensing techniques. The synergy provides a method to compensate the deficiency of one technique by using information from the other technique.

The paper illustrates the benefit of synergy for the precipitation and echo top heights products of radar and cloud top heights from satellite. The synergy leads to suppression of spurious signals and facilitate the product interpretation both by forecasters and the general public. It also facilitates the removal of errors in automated processing of data.