Satellite remote sensing of cloud distribution and amount of rainfall over the Tibet Plateau area of China

The use of images from the GOES-1 satellite to study mesoscale convective clouds over the Tibet Plateau region in China is discussed. The correlation between the quantity of rainfall observed at the ground and the cloud volume dissipation per unit area as determined from satellite IR imagery is examined. It is shown that this relationship is almost linear for the rainfall rate exceeding 8 mm/day.