PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | December 14, 1998
Proc. SPIE. 3495, Satellite Remote Sensing of Clouds and the Atmosphere III
KEYWORDS: Atmospheric modeling, Data modeling, Statistical analysis, Statistical modeling, Algorithm development, Microwave radiation, Atmospheric physics, Satellites, Databases, Temperature metrology
Knowledge of water cycle in the atmosphere is very useful for several climatological and meteorological applications. This work presents a forward model of atmospheric emission in clear sky conditions, over Mediterranean sea. Solving a polarized radiative transfer scheme, brightness temperatures at the top of atmosphere were calculated. By fitting such temperatures against those measured by he SSM/I microwave radiometer effective vertical profiles of atmospheric water vapor were retrieved. Eventually, total precipitable water values were estimated. These values were compared with those obtained through statistical well-known algorithms from SSM/I brightness temperatures. The reported procedure was applied on a dataset, made up of Mediterranean scenes acquired during summer. The present work showed the feasibility of obtaining total precipitable water estimates as accurate as statistical ones; moreover, this approach provides information about the effective vertical atmospheric temperature, pressure and water vapor profiles, that allows this procedure to be more flexible and reliable, both form a spatial and a temporal point of view. Therefore, we characterized the presented research, calibrating our procedure for the Mediterranean area: a relative poor region, as far as field observation are concerned.
