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In this paper, we illustrate a new, simple and complementary ground-based methodology to retrieve the vertically resolved atmospheric precipitation intensity through a synergy between measurements from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Micropulse Lidar network (MPLNET), an analytical model solution and ground-based disdrometer measurements. The presented results are obtained at two mid-latitude MPLNET permanent observational sites, located respectively at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA, and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. The methodology is suitable to be applied to existing and/or future lidar/ceilometer networks with the main objective of either providing near real-time (3 h latency) rainfall intensity measurements and/or to validate satellite missions, especially for critical light precipitation (<3 mm h − 1 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Detection and reconstruction of early instrumental series is an interdisciplinary activity that allows us to extend climate data records to periods prior to the mid-19th century, extending the overlapping periods with climate proxies and characterizing extreme events. In this work, the collection of several data sources corresponding to different periods and locations, obtained with a wide range of methods and instruments by institutions or private observers, provides the following results: Barcelona has a continuous rainfall series with monthly resolution since 1786 and with daily resolution since 1850. It is worth mentioning that the records from Barcelona provide the longest continuous monthly series available on rainfall in the Iberian Peninsula. The monthly records have been homogenized by using a relative homogenization approach, HOMER. The results highlight the existence of five breaks, most of them due to relocations or instrumentation changes documented in the metadata, which have been adjusted to remove non-climatic factors. The homogenized annual and winter precipitation series in Barcelona show a statistically significant increase from 1786 to 2014, although this increase is mainly due to the concentration of negative anomalies during the first half of the 19th century, which is also clearly visible in the seasonal series. Specifically, an extreme mega-drought episode was observed from the 1810s to the 1830s, which is supported by different proxy data. For a better dissemination of the homogenized monthly series developed in this study, the data set is freely available to the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rainfall spatial organization in the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Spain) has been studied from records of an urban rain gauge network in the period 1994-2009. Using statistical and regional analysis techniques, correlation between data recorded by the different rain gauges has been calculated, and the effective number of independent stations ( n) equivalent to the used network has been determined. It has been found out that for durations longer than 20 min, the areal rainfall return period observed for a storm registered by the network approximately decreases by a factor of 1/ n in relation to the current point rainfall intensity-duration-frequency relationships for the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Using objective analysis techniques, continuous precipitation fields have been generated on a regular grid with a spatial resolution of 300 × 300 m for the storms registered by the rain gauges from 1994 to 2009, for durations from 10 min to 24 h. The precipitation fields obtained have been useful to estimate the characteristic areal reduction factors in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. A direct relationship has been found between the areal reduction factor for all the area corresponding to the urban rainfall network of Barcelona and the effective number of n for every duration considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]