Campaign: Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer EOS on Aqua (AQUA_AMSRE)
The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer Earth Observing System (AMSRE) was launched on May 4, 2002 aboard NASAs Aqua spacecraft. The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) provided AMSRE to NASA as an indispensable part of Aqua s global hydrology mission. Over the oceans, AMSRE is measuring a number of important geophysical parameters, including sea surface temperature (SST), wind speed, atmospheric water vapor, cloud water, and rain rate. A key feature of AMSRE is its capability to see through clouds, thereby providing an uninterrupted view of global SST and surface wind fields. The AMSRE Ocean Products produced here are made using a modified version of the ASMRE Direct Broadcast (DB) algorithm developed for NASA. An on orbit calibration method developed at Remote Sensing Systems (remss.com)is used to convert counts to brightness temperatures. Calibration methodology and preliminary validation results are described in the paper: ON ORBIT CALIBRATION OF AMSRE AND THE RETRIEVAL OF OCEAN PRODUCTS by Wentz et al. (http://ssmi.com/papers/amsr/on orbit_calibration_amsre_and_ocean_products.pdf). This project description is taken from: http://ssmi.com/amsr/amsr_data_description.html)
Provenance: local copy of the AMSRE L2P Version 5 SST Daily Means Data Set from Remote Sensing Systems downloaded via FTP:
ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/sea_surface_temperature/GHRSST/data/L2P_GRIDDED/AMSRE/ (can also be downloaded at: ftp://ftp.misst.org/amsre/gridded/nc/ or ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/sst/misst/amsre/gridded/nc/).
Local files are located under WELLE.ZMAW.DE:/scratch/local3/u290022/DATA/SATELLITE/SST/GHRSST/data/L2P_GRIDDED/AMSRE/REMSS/all/
Source and Methods: the RSS AMSRE dataset consists of data derived from observations collected by the AMSRE instrument carried on board AQUA. L2P data products are derived from native SST data products. L2P data products consist of the original SST data values that have been reformatted to a netCDF file format. A L2P confidence data record is provided for each SST pixel. Remote Sensing Systems performs a detailed processing of AMSR-E instrument data in two stages.
The first stage produces a near-real-time (NRT) product which is made available ASAP, generally within 3 hours of when the data are recorded. The NRT products are not intended to be archive quality and are deleted within several days. "Final" data (identified by "v5" within the file name) are processed when we receive the NCEP FNL analysis. The NCEP wind directions are useful for retrieving more accurate SSTs and wind speeds. The final "v5" products will continue to accumulate new swaths (half orbits) until the maps are full, generally within 2 days. The final refers to the type of swath processing, and does not imply that a data file is finalized (as in, will not change). Calibration methodology and preliminary validation results are described in the paper: ON-ORBIT CALIBRATION OF AMSR-E AND THE RETRIEVAL OF OCEAN PRODUCTS by Wentz et al. (http://ssmi.com/papers/amsr/on-orbit_calibration_amsre_and_ocean_products.pdf). This project description is taken from: http://ssmi.com/amsr/amsr_data_description.html).
A major update to the AMSR-E processing algorithm was completed February 6, 2006. This update is called Version 5 (V05). The document (Remote Sensing ...
Description
A major update to the AMSR-E processing algorithm was completed February 6, 2006. This update is called Version 5 (V05). The document (Remote Sensing Systems Technical Report 020706, http://www.remss.com/amsr/docs/AMSRE_V05_Updates.pdf) describes the changes that were made relative to the previous Version 4 (V04). The changes are summarized below:
1. Improvements to the geolocation routines have been made. The latitude and longitudes for the geophysical retrievals are now more accurate. Errors in V04 were as large as 5-10 km. For V05 the error is estimated to be 1 to 3 km.
2. A correction has been applied to remove moon contamination in the AMSR-E cold mirror.
3. Improvements have been made to the AMSR-E rain rates, with an overall effect of reducing the rain rates substantially in the tropics.
4. Near-real time bytemaps and imagery that is 3 to 6 hours behind real time are now available. This represents a decrease in data latency of 12 to 16 hours relative to the V04 products.