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Retrieval of surface and atmospheric parameters over land from SSM/I: Potential and limitations
Author(s) -
Prigent C.,
Rossow W. R.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
quarterly journal of the royal meteorological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.744
H-Index - 143
eISSN - 1477-870X
pISSN - 0035-9009
DOI - 10.1002/qj.49712555903
Subject(s) - inversion (geology) , environmental science , water vapor , a priori and a posteriori , remote sensing , meteorology , microwave , liquid water path , satellite , atmospheric sciences , computer science , precipitation , geology , geography , physics , paleontology , telecommunications , philosophy , epistemology , structural basin , astronomy
Abstract The potential to retrieve surface temperature, water vapour content and cloud liquid water path from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) observations over land is examined, using a variational inversion scheme. the method relies upon prior estimates of the monthly mean land surface microwave emissivities and exploits a priori information on the atmospheric situation (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) data and National Center for Environmental Prediction analysis). the accuracy of the surface temperature retrieval is of the order of 1 K, does not strongly depend on surface type and is not very sensitive to the presence of thin clouds. the sensitivity to the water vapour is very low except in the most arid areas. With an accuracy of ∼ 0.1 kg m −2 , the SSM/I retrieval does not properly characterize thin clouds, but the major cloud structures are well delineated and qualitative agreement is observed between the SSM/I and ISCCP estimations. This inversion process also has some ability to detect rain events.