Extended Abstract (232K)P4.6
A Climatology-Based Scheme for Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) Quality Control: An Application to Monthly Rainfall Rates
Daniel A. Vila, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, College Park, MD; and R. R. Ferraro and H. Semunegus
Global monthly rainfall estimates have been produced from over 20 years of measurements from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program series of Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I). This is the longest passive microwave dataset available to analyze the seasonal, annual, and interannual rainfall variability on a global scale. Because previous SSM/I processing was performed in real time, only a basic quality control (QC) procedure had been employed to avoid unrealistic values in the input data. These are caused by sensor anomalies, level 0 radiance processing errors, etc. A more sophisticated, climatology-based QC procedure on the daily time scale (antenna temperature) was developed to remove unrealistic values not detected in the original database and was employed to reprocess the rainfall product using the current version of the algorithm for the period 1992-2007. Discrepancies associated with the SSM/I derived monthly rainfall products are characterized through comparisons with various gauge-based and other satellite-derived rainfall estimates. A substantial reduction in biases was observed as a result of the implementation of this new QC scheme.
Poster Session 4, Satellite Observations of Climate: Research on Processes and Trends - Posters
Tuesday, 28 September 2010, 3:00 PM-5:00 PM, ABC Pre-Function
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