New Climate Products Available from DISCOVER

DISCOVER is a NASA funded project that strives to provide highly accurate, long-term climate data records and near-real-time ocean products suitable for the most demanding Earth research applications via easy-to-use display and data access tools. The project is a follow-on to the SSM/I Pathfinder project which pioneered the simultaneous retrieval of surface wind speed, columnar water vapor, cloud liquid water content, and rain rate from SSM/I observations. The ocean products available through DISCOVER are derived from multi-sensor observations combined into daily products and a consistent multi-decadal climate time series. The DISCOVER team has a strong track record in identifying and removing unexpected sources of systematic error in radiometric measurements, including misspecification of SSM/I pointing geometry, the slightly emissive TMI antenna, and problems with the hot calibration source on AMSR-E. This in-depth experience with intercalibration is absolutely essential for achieving our objective of merging multi-sensor observations into consistent data sets. Extreme care in satellite inter-calibration and commonality of geophysical algorithms is applied to all sensors. In addition to the sea surface temperature product already available, we introduce in this poster the latest DISCOVER products, a 4x-daily microwave water vapor global ocean product and a daily cumulative rain product. Potential use of these products is included. DISCOVER is a collaboration of Remote Sensing Systems and the Global Hydrology & Climate Center which is composed of NASA and university scientists residing at the National Space Science Technology Center on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.