HR: 1400h
AN: H53B-08    [Abstracts]
TI: Evaluating Intercalibrated Passive Microwave Rain Rates and Hydrological Consistency
AU: * Hilburn, K
EM: hilburn@remss.com
AF: Remote Sensing Systems, 438 First Street, Suite 200, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, United States
AU: Wentz, F
EM: frank.wentz@remss.com
AF: Remote Sensing Systems, 438 First Street, Suite 200, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, United States
AU: Smith, D
EM: smith@remss.com
AF: Remote Sensing Systems, 438 First Street, Suite 200, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, United States
AB: Remote Sensing Systems simultaneously retrieves sea surface temperature, surface wind speed, columnar water vapor, columnar cloud water, and surface rain rate from a variety of passive microwave radiometers including SSM/I, TMI, and AMSR. The rain component of the retrieval algorithm has recently undergone major improvements, and the newly reprocessed data are now available. The physical basis for these changes will be briefly described. We have also completed a major intercalibration effort. In the most recent Version 6, the six SSM/Is have been carefully intercalibrated to a precision of about 0.1 K in brightness temperature, and TMI and AMSR-E have been adjusted to match the SSM/I time series. Wind speed retrievals are very sensitive to brightness temperature calibration errors, and the good agreement with buoys is consistent with an intercalibration error of 0.1 to 0.2 K or less. We use the SSM/I wind and rain products to examine the balance of evaporation and precipitation. Trends over the 20 year time period are used to assess the long-term stability of the dataset. Assessing wind speed errors is easier than assessing precipitation errors, and the magnitude of the error bar on the SSM/I wind trend is estimated to be 0.05 m/s/decade at the 95 percent confidence level. Evaporation is used to help evaluate the accuracy of our precipitation retrievals, and we compare our results to GPCP. Special attention is paid to the middle latitude oceans where passive microwave estimates are still in wide disagreement.
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 1836 Hydrological cycles and budgets (1218, 1655)
DE: 1854 Precipitation (3354)
DE: 1855 Remote sensing (1640)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly