Rainfall estimation from liquid water content and precipitable water content data over land, ocean and plateau

A simplistic approach has been proposed to estimate annual rainfall amount from cloud liquid water content and precipitable water content utilizing the data pertaining to the period of 1997-2006. The study involves seven land locations over India, seven stations over plateau and seven locations over the Indian Ocean. The wavelet analyses exhibit prominent annual peaks in the global spectra of rainfall, cloud liquid water content and precipitable water content. Power-law relationships are found to exist between the global wavelet peaks of precipitation and those of both the parameters, namely, cloud liquid water content and precipitable water content. Again, a linear relationship exists between global wavelet peaks of rainfall amount and total rainfall amount. The rainfall estimations utilizing cloud liquid water content data exhibit better matching with the measured values than those utilizing precipitable water content data. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.