Retrieval of temperature and moisture profiles from AMSU-A and AMSU-B measurements

Author

Rosenkranz, Philip W.

Author_Institution

Res. Lab. of Electron., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

39

Issue

11

fYear

2001

fDate

11/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2429

Lastpage

2435

Abstract

The NOAA-15 weather satellite carries the Advanced Microwave Sounding Units-A and -B (AMSU-A, AMSU-B) which measure thermal emission from an atmospheric oxygen band, two water lines, and several window frequencies. An iterated minimum-variance algorithm retrieves profiles of temperature and humidity in the atmosphere from this data. Relative humidity is converted into absolute humidity with use of the retrieved temperature profile. Two important issues in the retrieval problem are modeling of the surface and clouds. An a priori surface emissivity is computed on the basis of a preliminary classification, and the surface brightness spectrum is subsequently adjusted simultaneously with the moisture profile retrieval. Cloud liquid water is constrained by a condensation model that uses an extended definition of relative humidity as a parameter

Keywords

atmospheric humidity; atmospheric temperature; remote sensing; 23.8 to 183.31 GHz; AMSU-A measurements; AMSU-B measurements; Advanced Microwave Sounding Units; NOAA-15 weather satellite; absolute humidity; atmosphere; atmospheric oxygen band; cloud liquid water; condensation model; iterated minimum-variance algorithm; moisture profile retrieval; relative humidity; surface brightness spectrum; temperature profile retrieval; thermal emission; water lines; Artificial satellites; Atmosphere; Atmospheric measurements; Clouds; Frequency measurement; Humidity; Information retrieval; Microwave measurements; Moisture; Temperature;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0196-2892

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/36.964979

Filename

964979