This note is intended to serve primarily as a reference guide to users wishing to make use of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission data. It covers each of the three primary rainfall instruments: the passive microwave radiometer, the precipitation radar, and the Visible and Infrared Radiometer System on board the spacecraft. Radiometric characteristics, scanning geometry, calibration procedures, and data products are described for each of these three sensors.

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Six different convective-stratiform separation techniques, including a new technique that utilizes the ratio of vertical and terminal velocities, are compared and evaluated using two-dimensional numerical simulations of a tropical [Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE)] and midlatitude continental [Preliminary Regional Experiment for STORM-Central (PRESTORM)] squall line. Comparisons are made in terms of rainfall, cloud coverage, mass fluxes, apparent heating and moistening, mean hydrometeor profiles, CFADs (Contoured Frequency with Altitude Diagrams), microphysics, and latent heating retrieval. Overall, it was found that the different separation techniques produced results that qualitatively agreed. However, the quantitative differences were significant. Observational comparisons were unable to conclusively evaluate the performance of the techniques. Latent heating retrieval was shown to be sensative to the use of separation technique mainly due to the stratiform region for methods that found very little stratiform rain.

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