Title
A Fundamental Climate Data Record Derived from AMSR-E, MWRI, and AMSR2
Abstract
Fundamental climate data records (FCDRs) play a vital role in monitoring climate change. In this article, we develop a spaceborne passive microwave-based FCDR by recalibrating the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) on the Aqua satellite, the microwave radiometer imager (MWRI) onboard the Feng-Yun-3B (FY3B) satellite, and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) onboard the JAXA’s Global Change Observation Mission first-Water (GCOM-W1) satellite. Before recalibration, it is found that AMSR-E and AMSR2 observations are stable over time, but MWRI drifted colder before May 2015 and had nonnegligible errors in geolocation for most channels. In addition, intersensor differences of brightness temperatures (TBs) are as large as 5–10 K. To improve data consistency and continuity, several intersensor calibration methods are applied by using AMSR2 as a reference while using MWRI to bridge the data gap between AMSR2 and AMSR-E. The double difference method is used to provide intersensor difference time series for correcting calibration biases, such as scene temperature-dependent bias, solar-heating-induced bias, and systematic constant bias. Hardware differences between sensors are corrected using principal component analysis. After recalibration, the mean biases of both MWRI and AMSR-E are less than 0.3 K compared to the AMSR2 reference and their standard deviations are less than 1 K for all channels. Under oceanic rain-free conditions, the TB biases are less than 0.2 K for all channels and no significant relative bias drifts were found between sensors for overlapping observations. These statistics suggest that the consistency between these instruments was significantly improved and the derived FCDR could be useful to obtain long-term water cycle-related variables for climate research.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TGRS.2020.2966055
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Microwave radiometry,Satellite broadcasting,Calibration,Microwave imaging,Microwave measurement,Microwave theory and techniques,Extraterrestrial measurements
Journal
58
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
0196-2892
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Banghai Wu100.34
Yu Wang221.38
Cheng-Zhi Zou300.68
Rui Li402.03
Shi Liu500.34
Guosheng Liu600.34
Yunfei Fu700.68