Summary of Radar-rainfall Research, 1952-1968

A summary of research activities and their highlights during the past sixteen years has been prepared in order to focus on the state of knowledge concerning the measurement of rainfall with 3-cm radar. Much effort has been expended on determining the raindrop size distributions for many climatic areas. In order to evaluate the radar, dense networks of rain gages were employed. The availability of the radar and a dense network of raingages has resulted in numerous applications of these facilities for related studies in hydrometeorology, cloud physics and weather modification experiments. In summary, a well calibrated radar is capable of measuring rainfall which is equivalent to about one gage in 60 square miles, detects severe storms, etc., but its utilization is limited due to lack of instrumentation to properly process the large amount of data that becomes available to the user and to the meteorological variance between storms.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewedOpe