Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) for Operational and CubeSat Satellite Applications

The Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) operationally supports satellite radiance assimilation for weather forecast, sensor data verifications, and retrievals of satellite products. This presentation will discuss recent improvements of the CRTM and the applications in support of instrumental calibration and validation.

The CRTM serves as a useful tool, greatly support sensor calibration and validation for JPSS and GOES-R missions. By subtracting CRTM simulated radiance from the ATMS measurements, one can reveal and analyze the weak striping in few channels of the SNPP ATMS sensor. With the help of the CRTM, scientists at the NOAA have developed the algorithm for cloud detection based on a pair or a set of pairs of the CrIS channels.

Using the CRTM, we found the root cause in the VIIRS M15 image. The CRTM is also used in radiance monitoring system. This presentation will also demonstrate how the CRTM plays a role in the NOAA Microwave Integrated Retrieval System (MiRS) for the generation of atmospheric profiles of temperature and water vapor, cloud liquid water, ice water content, rainfall rate, snow cover and snow water equivalent, snow fall rate, surface temperature and microwave emissivity, and sea ice concentration.

Recently, the CRTM also directly support new small satellite application such as The Earth Observing Nanosatellite-Microwave (EON-MW). The model has been applied to the second MicroMAS mission (MicroMAS-2) that has 12 channels near 91, 118, 183, and 204 GHz to provide precipitation, temperature, and humidity measurements from a 3U CubeSat.