Evaluation of the Amazon Rain Forrest as a Distributed Target for Satellite Microwave Radiometer Calibration

For decades, the task to precisely calibrate the satellite microwave radiometer is challenging. The evaluation of the absolute calibration of the TMI brightness temperatures is an extremely formidable task due to the difficulty in obtaining an accurate standard with which to compare the TMI. The proposed research will investigate the Amazon rain forest area as a distributed target for the Satellite Microwave radiometer calibration. History shows us that homogeneity exist in the Amazon Basin so it is useful for the satellite radiometer calibration. There are two principal goals of this research, namely; (1) to measure the brightness temperature (Tb) over the entire Amazon rain forest region to see how it varies over the wide range of forest, (2) to calculate the emissivity for that entire region using the Land surface temperature data from the MODIS sensor from two different satellite TERRA and AQUA.