92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Monday, 23 January 2012
Error Analysis of SSM/I F08 Antenna Temperatures to Produce An Extended Record of Observations for Climate Applications
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
Dustin Snare, California Univ. of Pennsylvania, California, PA; and W. Berg, M. R. P. Sapiano, and C. D. Kummerow

The Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) is a conically scanning window channel microwave radiometer that was first launched aboard the DMSP F08 satellite in June of 1987 and collected brightness temperature data that are now being used for a variety of climate applications. This was the only window channel radiometer in space collecting this data from 1987 until the launch of F10 in December of 1990, although it continued operating until its demise at the end of 1991. The utility of these data for many climate applications has been limited due to errors in the brightness temperatures data resulting from problems associated with data transmission, geolocation, and timing issues. The goal of this project was to identify and eliminate the erroneous data while keeping as much of the original data as possible and specifically avoiding the elimination of data associated with extreme weather phenomena. A quality control procedure was developed that uses a moving data window comparing the observed brightness temperature data with climatological values. This approach involved three adjustable coefficients including the number of pixels in a scan that were more than three sigma from the climatological mean, the number of scans in the data window exceeding this threshold, and the width of the data window. Through an analysis of multiple cases of both bad data and good data containing extreme weather events, coefficients were selected to meet the specified criteria and applied to the entire data four and a half year data record.

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