Intercalibration of High Frequency Channels on GPM Constellation

Abstract:

The Global Precipitation Measuring (GPM) mission is an international effort to measure precipitation worldwide every three hours. The research objective is to reduce errors in global rainfall estimates associated with temporal/spatial sampling by using a constellation of satellites.

Inter-calibration of microwave radiometer channels using the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) is a challenging task. In GPM constellation we have a combination of cross track and conical scanner sensors, the goal is to make a consistent measurement between all the sensors in this constellation. GMI is a conical scanner and is going to be a reference for the calibration of all the other sensors in the constellation., almost all the sensors with channels lower than 89 GHz are conical scanners, the inter-calibration between conical scanners have been done successfully over years, But for frequencies equal and higher than 89GHz, there is SSMIS on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) which is a conical scanner, other sensors such as ATMS on AMSU, MHS on NOAA 18, NOAA 19, METOP A and METOP B and SAPHIR on Megha -Tropique , are cross track sensors. For these sensors each Instantaneous Field of View (IFOV) has different Earth incidence angles (EIA) and different slant paths through the atmosphere while conical scanner has constant earth incidence angle for all IFOVs. Here the double difference (DD) technique, which has been successfully applied for imager channel calibration before, has been applied to sounder channels, also the effect of using different surface emissivity models such as Elsasser’s and RSS model and atmosphere models such as Rosenkranz and MonoRTM models, in these frequencies has been investigated.