The Bolton Experiment: An Experimental Test of the Use of Microwave Attenuation to improve Rainfall Estimates in Urban Areas, and hence to Enhance Flood Warning The Bolton Experiment was a NERC project with matching funds from industry which took place between 1999 and 2002.It was a collaboration between the University of Essex (Propagation and Remote Sensing group, the University of Salford (Telford Research Institute), and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Radiocommunications Research Unit) and the industrial partners North West Water Plc and Norweb Communications (both companies of United Utilities), the UK Meteorological Office, The Environment Agency and Crown Castle International. The purpose of the study is to test the proposal developed at Essex, in conjunction with RAL, that the difference in attenuation at two microwave frequencies along a given path provides an accurate estimate of path-integrated rainfall rate, and to investigate its application to hydrological studies of urban catchments. The catchment selected for study is the Bolton catchment, in which the town is largely surrounded by hills, and the River Croal is carried in culverts in the town centre. Four microwave links will be set up, three of them dual frequency and one single frequency. In addition to data from microwave links and radar, there will also be data available from a number of telemetered tipping bucket raingauges. The dataset contains microwave, raingauge and radar data. It also contains data analysis to extract information from the link attenuation data on path-averaged rainfall rate, and comparison with the results with those obtained from the raingauges and the radar. The dataset is now public.

Data were collected by the Chilbolton Facility for Atmospheric and Radio Research (CFARR) Visible Radiometer from 10th of May 2001 to the present at Chilbolton, Hampshire. The dataset contains measurements of Calibrated brightness temperature measured at 21 frequencies (selectable) between 22.0 and 30.0 GHz, water vapour profile, and integrated water vapour (IWV). Data are produced once every approximately 2 minutes.

The BACI Surface State Vector (SSV) dataset for the Romanian fast track site and provides a description of the surface state from a combination of satellite observations across wavelength domains i.e. albedo (visible), Land Surface Temperature (LST) (passive/thermal microwave) and backscatter (active microwave). The dataset contains a unique spatially and temporally consistent (as far as the observations allow) series of observations of the land surface, across optical and microwave domains. The innovation of this approach is in providing a SSV in a common space/time framework, containing information from multiple, independent data streams, with associated uncertainty. The methods used can be used to combine data from multiple different satellite sources. The resulting dataset is intended to make the best use of all available observations to detect changes in the land surface state: the combination of data is likely to show changes that would not be apparent from data in a single wavelength region. The inclusion of uncertainty also allows the strength of the resulting changes to be properly quantified.