This paper provides a new method for the classification of rainfall areas in convective and stratiform rain using MSG/SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared) data. The proposed approach is based on spectral and temporal properties of clouds. The spectral parameters used are: brightness temperature (BT) and brightness temperature differences (BTDs), and the temporal parameter (RCT10.8) is the rate of change of (BT) in the 10.8µm channel over two consecutive images. The developed rain area classification technique (RACT-DN) is based on two multilayer perceptron neural networks (MLP-D for daytime and MLP-N for nighttime) which relies on the correlation of satellite data with convective and stratiform rain. The two algorithms (MLP-D and MLP-N) are trained using as reference data from ground meteorological radar over northern Algeria. The results show that RACT-DN classifier gives accurate discrimination between convective and stratiform areas during daytime and nighttime.

Rain areas delineation proposed in this paper is based on the image fusion from geostationary Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite, with the low-earth orbiting passive Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. The fusion technique described in this work used an artificial neural network (ANN). It's has been developed to detect instantaneous rainfall by using information from the IR images of MSG satellite and from TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI). The study is carried out over north of Algeria. Seven spectral parameters are used as input data of ANN to identify raining or non - raining pixels. Corresponding data of raining /non-raining pixels are taken from a PR (precipitation radar) issued from TRMM. Results from the developed scheme are compared with the results of SI method (Scattering Index) taken as reference method. The results show that the developed model performs very well and overcomes the deficiencies of use a single satellite.