Analysis and Mitigation of Striping Noise in Two Water Vapor Sounding Channels of Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI) plays an important role in monitoring global precipitation. In this study, an along-track striping noise is found in GMI observations of brightness temperatures for the two highest-frequency channels—12 and 13—with their central frequencies centered at 183.31 GHz. These two channels are designed for sounding the water vapor in the middle and upper troposphere. The pitch maneuver data of deep space confirmed an existence of striping noise in channels 12 and 13. A striping noise mitigation method is used for extracting the striping noise from the earth scene or deep space measurements of brightness temperatures by combining the principle component analysis (PCA) with the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method. A power spectrum density analysis indicated that the frequency of striping noise ranges between 0.06 and 0.533 s −1 , where the right bound of 0.533 s −1 of frequency is exactly the inverse of the time (i.e., 1.875 s) it takes for the GMI to complete one conical scan line. The magnitude of striping noise in the brightness temperature observations of GMI channels 12 and 13 is about ±0.3 K. It is shown that after striping noise mitigation, the observation minus model simulation (O − B) distributions of both the earth scene and deep space brightness temperatures show no visible striping features.