HR: 08:45h
AN: A11D-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Improved remote sensing of water vapor and cirrus clouds with MODIS instruments onboard the Terra and Aqua Spacecrafts
AU: * Gao, B
EM: gao@nrl.navy.mil
AF: Naval Research Laboratory, 4555 Overlook Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20375 United States
AB: The Moderate Resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MODIS) instruments onboard the NASA Terra and Aqua Spacecrafts have serveral channels located within and around the 0.94-micron water vapor band absorption region. Improved remote sensing of water vapor over land areas has been obtained from these channels. The MODIS near-IR water vapor data products have important applications in many fields, such as meteorology and climatology. One recent use of MODIS water vapor products is to perform atmospheric corrections for interferometric synthetic aperature radar (InSAR) measurements and to yield improved estimates of surface deformation in southern California. The MODIS instruments are also equipped with a channel centered at 1.375 micron for remote sensing of high clouds. Improved cirrus cloud climatology has been established from several years of MODIS measurements. The 1.375-micron channel data can, in principle, be used for correction of thin cirrus scattering effects and therfore to yield improved retrievals of land surface reflectances, ocean color, sea surface temperatures, and aerosol optical depths and particle size distributions from MODIS data.
DE: 0480 Remote sensing
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005