Connecting ATMS, AMSU and MSU Brightness Temperature Data Records through Mission Life-Cycle Reprocessing

The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) on board the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite profiles atmospheric temperature and moisture through the 22 channel observations. There have been more than five years of ATMS antenna temperature record (TDR) since its launch on October 28, 2011. ATMS TDR has been reprocessed with the latest calibration algorithm used in IDPS Block 2.0 and the data quality has been significantly improved by taking into account an antenna reflector emission correction, Lunar intrusion correction, a remapping to convert the ATMS 5.2^o window channels 1-2 and the 2.2^o temperature sounding channels 3-16 FOVs into AMSU-A’s 3.3^o FOVs, and striping noise mitigation. The operational AMSU and MSU calibration was processed with different algorithms from those of ATMS. The quality control of AMSU space view and warm load counts was not as tight as ATMS. The Platinum Resistance Thermometers (PRTs) of warm load are determined from polynomial equations for AMSU instead of the Newton Raphson equation for ATMS. Noise filtering on calibration counts is done through a boxcar function for AMSU whereas a triangle function is used for ATMS. This study will firstly investigate developing and testing a consistent SDR algorithm for ATMS, AMSU and MSU calibration. Impacts of the mission life cycle reprocessing on the MSU/AMSU-A/ATMS derived decadal trends of the atmospheric temperatures within tropospheric and low stratospheric layers are quantified and compared with those derived from the original data without reprocessing.