Separation of convective and stratiform precipitation using polarimetric radar data with a support vector machine method

A precipitation separation approach using a support vector machine method was developed and tested on a C-band polarimetric weather radar located in Taiwan (RCMK). Different from those methods requiring whole-volume scan data, the proposed approach utilizes polarimetric radar data from the lowest unblocked tilt to classify precipitation echoes into either stratiform or convective types. In this algorithm, inputs of radar reflectivity, differential reflectivity, and the separation index are integrated through a support vector machine. The weight vector and bias in the support vector machine were optimized using well-classified data from two precipitation events. The proposed approach was tested with three precipitation events, including a widespread mixed stratiform and convective event, a tropical typhoon precipitation event, and a stratiform-precipitation event. Results from the multi-radar–multi-sensor (MRMS) precipitation classification algorithm were used as the ground truth in the performance evaluation. The performance of the proposed approach was also compared with the approach using the separation index only. It was found that the proposed method can accurately classify the convective and stratiform precipitation and produce better results than the approach using the separation index only.