ON THE RELIABILITY OF CURRENT MW-IR TECHNIQUES IN QUANTITATIVE PRECIPITATION MEASUREMENTS OVER MEDITERRANEAN BASIN

New satellite missions are near operational or in advanced planning stage: some of them are specifically devoted to the remote sensing of precipitation at space and time scales suitable for near-real-time applications. In this paper we address the capability of different sensors and sensors' combination in estimating precipitation in mediterranean area. Three events are analized in view of near-future sensors' availability (EGPM, GPM, MSG), to simulate the impact of these data on the real-time rain estimation. In particular we will focus our attention on combining the microwave signals coming from the visible/infrared with microwave rain estimates to evaluate the potentiality of new sensors on current algorithm. We analysed three cases occurred in Italy in the last years where reliable rainfall reference were available, discussing the critical impact of complex orography on the estimates.