Abstract
The NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) has produced a 17-plus-year time-series of calibrated microwave radiances that have remarkable value for investigating the effects of the Earth’s climate change over the tropics. Recently, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Inter-Satellite Radiometric Calibration (XCAL) Working Group have performed various calibration and corrections that yielded the legacy TMI 1B11 Version 8 (also called GPM05) brightness temperature product, which will be released in late 2017 by the NASA Precipitation Processing System. Since TMI served as the radiometric transfer standard for the TRMM constellation microwave radiometer sensors, it is important to document its accuracy. In this paper, the various improvements applied to TMI 1B11 V8 are summarized, and the radiometric calibration stability is evaluated by comparisons with a radiative transfer model and by XCAL evaluations with the Global Precipitation Measuring Microwave Imager during their 13-month overlap period. Evaluation methods will be described and results will be presented, which demonstrate that TMI has achieved a radiometric stability level of a few deciKelvin over almost two decades.
Highlights
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) was a joint space project between the NationalAeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to measure tropical precipitation from a low-inclination orbit [1]
TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI), and the active Precipitation Radar (PR), while this paper focuses on only the the passiveTRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) radiometric calibration characteristics over this 17-year legacy period
The single differences (SD) for channel 10.65 V are plotted in Figure 9, where the values are averaged by bin and During theby over
Summary
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to measure tropical precipitation from a low-inclination orbit [1]. For the TRMM constellation of cooperative satellites, the TRMM Project used a common rain retrieval algorithm (GPROF), which assumed all the radiometer sensors were radiometrically intercalibrated. For this purpose, TMI was used as the radiometric transfer standard to perform inter-satellite radiometric cross-calibration (XCAL) of the constellation, until it was decommissioned
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