Ferraro, R.R.; Nelson, B.R.; Smith, T.; Prat, O.P. The AMSU-Based Hydrological Bundle Climate Data Record—Description and Comparison with Other Data Sets. Remote Sens.2018, 10, 1640.
Ferraro, R.R.; Nelson, B.R.; Smith, T.; Prat, O.P. The AMSU-Based Hydrological Bundle Climate Data Record—Description and Comparison with Other Data Sets. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 1640.
Ferraro, R.R.; Nelson, B.R.; Smith, T.; Prat, O.P. The AMSU-Based Hydrological Bundle Climate Data Record—Description and Comparison with Other Data Sets. Remote Sens.2018, 10, 1640.
Ferraro, R.R.; Nelson, B.R.; Smith, T.; Prat, O.P. The AMSU-Based Hydrological Bundle Climate Data Record—Description and Comparison with Other Data Sets. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 1640.
Abstract
Passive microwave measurements have been available on satellites dating back to the 1970s on research satellites flown by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Since then, several other sensors have been flown to retrieve hydrological products for both operational weather applications (e.g., the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager–SSM/I; the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit–AMSU) and climate applications (e.g., the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–AMSR; the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission Microwave Imager–TMI; the Global Precipitation Mission Microwave Imager–GMI). Here the focus is on measurements from the AMSU-A, AMSU-B and Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS). These sensors have been in operation since 1998 with the launch of NOAA-15, and are also on board NOAA-16, -17, -18, -19 and the MetOp-A and -B satellites. A data set called the “Hydrological Bundle” is a Climate Data Record (CDR) that utilizes brightness temperatures from Fundamental CDRs to generate Thematic CDRs (TCDR). The TCDR’s include: Total Precipitable Water (TPW), Cloud Liquid Water (CLW), Sea-Ice concentration (SIC), Land surface temperature (LST), Land surface emissivity (LSE) for 23, 31, 50 GHz, rain rate (RR), snow cover (SC), ice water path (IWP), and snow water equivalent (SWE). The TCDR’s are shown to be in general good agreement with similar products from other sources such as the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) and the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2). Because of the careful intercalibration of the FCDR’s, little bias is found among the different TCDR’s produced from individual NOAA and MetOp satellites, except for normal diurnal cycle differences.
Keywords
Remote Sensing; Climate Data Record; Passive Microwave; Hydrology
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
