Estimation of Temperature and Humidity Profile Information from Microwave Radiances over Different Surface Types

Abstract Existing use of passive microwave radiances to improve temperature and humidity analyses in the troposphere has been largely restricted to ocean applications. Recent studies have shown that useful information can be extracted from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I), particularly for cloud liquid water and precipitation, over many land and ice surfaces. Furthermore, new work has provided improved estimates of emissivity at frequencies well above those normally used for land surface applications using satellite, airborne, and ground-based methods. In the light of these new developments, information theory was used to investigate the potential for microwave atmospheric temperature and humidity sounding over varied land and ice surfaces using the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit. It was found that significant information is available even at low altitude over land and sea-ice surfaces. With extensive land areas poorly served by conventional in situ sounding methods, this result gives conside...

[1]  James P. Hollinger,et al.  SSM/I instrument evaluation , 1990 .

[2]  Andrew S. Jones,et al.  Further Developments in Estimating Cloud Liquid Water over Land Using Microwave and Infrared Satellite Measurements , 1997 .

[3]  Stephen J. English,et al.  Airborne radiometric observations of cloud liquid‐water emission at 89 and 157 GHz: Application to retrieval of liquid‐water path , 1995 .

[4]  Gerald W. Felde,et al.  Retrieval of 91 and 150 GHz Earth surface emissivities , 1995 .

[5]  Catherine Prigent,et al.  Microwave land surface emissivities estimated from SSM/I observations , 1997 .

[6]  S. J. Cox,et al.  Global processing of satellite sounding radiances in a numerical weather prediction system , 1995 .

[7]  Andrew S. Jones,et al.  Satellite detection of cloud liquid water over land using polarization differences at 85.5 GHz , 1998 .

[8]  Grant W. Petty,et al.  The response of the SSM/I to the marine environment. Part 2: A parameterization of the effect of the sea surface slope distribution on emission and reflection , 1994 .

[9]  C. Rodgers,et al.  Retrieval of atmospheric temperature and composition from remote measurements of thermal radiation , 1976 .

[10]  Andrew S. Jones,et al.  Passive microwave remote sensing of cloud liquid water over land regions , 1990 .

[11]  N. Grody Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere from Satellites Using Microwave Radiometry , 1993 .

[12]  J. R. Eyre,et al.  Assimilation of TOVS radiance information through one-dimensional variational analysis , 1993 .

[13]  J. R. Eyre,et al.  On systematic errors in satellite sounding products and their climatological mean values , 1987 .

[14]  C. C. Wackerman,et al.  Aircraft active and passive microwave validation of sea ice concentration from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program special sensor microwave imager , 1991 .

[15]  Philippe Courtier,et al.  Unified Notation for Data Assimilation : Operational, Sequential and Variational , 1997 .

[16]  L. Phalippou,et al.  Variational retrieval of humidity profile, wind speed and cloud liquid‐water path with the SSM/I: Potential for numerical weather prediction , 1996 .

[17]  Retrieval of temperature profiles over sea ice with multisensor analysis: combination of the DMSP's SSM/I, OLS, and SSM/T1 sensors , 1995, 1995 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS '95. Quantitative Remote Sensing for Science and Applications.

[18]  Andrew S. Jones,et al.  Retrieval of microwave surface emittance over land using coincident microwave and infrared satellite measurements , 1997 .

[19]  John Derber,et al.  The Use of TOVS Cloud-Cleared Radiances in the NCEP SSI Analysis System , 1998 .

[20]  Claude N. Williams,et al.  Using the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager to Monitor Land Surface Temperatures, Wetness, and Snow Cover , 1998 .

[21]  Tim J. Hewison,et al.  Fast generic millimeter-wave emissivity model , 1998, Asia-Pacific Environmental Remote Sensing.

[22]  M. Owe,et al.  Microwave vegetation optical depth and inverse modelling of soil emissivity using Nimbus/SMMR satellite observations , 1994 .

[23]  Roger Saunders,et al.  Note on the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit , 1993 .