In the present study, forward radiative transfer simulations are carried out for the tropical cyclone Fanoos that hit the coast off south India in December 2005. The in-house radiative transfer package used for this study employs the doubling and adding method to calculate radiances leaving the top of the one dimensional precipitating atmosphere. The particle drop size distribution is assumed to follow a modified gamma distribution in respect of the cloud liquid water and cloud ice water content. For precipitation, the Marshall-Palmer particle size distribution is used. All the hydrometeor particles are assumed to be spherical and Lorentz Mie theory is used to evaluate the interaction parameters like absorption, scattering coefficients and polarized scattering matrix. In order to validate the drop size distributions and inter Action parameter calculations, the simulated brightness temperatures are compared with the TMI measured brightness temperatures for all the channels. For carrying out this exercise, vertical hydrometeors retrieved by TMI are used as input. The differences between simulated and measured brightness temperatures are found to be within ±10%. The maximum difference in the brightness temperatures between the present work and the Eddington model which the TRMM algorithm employs is about 4.5 K. This may become significant when retrieval of precipitation is attempted by combining the forward model with a suitable retrieval strategy, under tropical conditions. © Printed in India.