Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Earth's Surface and Atmosphere

This book contains a selection of refereed papers presented at the 6th Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment held in Florence, Italy on March 15-18, 1999. Over the last two decades, passive microwave remote sensing has made considerable progress, and has achieved significant results in the study of the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Many years of observations with ground-based and satellite-borne sensors have made an important contribution to improving our knowledge of many geophysical processes of the Earth's environment and of global changes. The evolution in microwave radiometers aboard satellites has increased steadily over recent years. At the same time, many investigations have been carried out both to improve the algorithms for the retrieval of geophysical parameters and to develop new technologies. The book is divided into four main sections: three of these are devoted to the observation of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, and the fourth, to future missions and new technologies. The first section deals with the study of sea and land surfaces, and reports recent advances in remote sensing of ocean wind, sea ice, soil moisture and vegetation biomass, including electromagnetic modelling and the assimilation of radiometric data in models of land surface processes. The following two sections are devoted to the measurement of atmospheric quantities which are of fundamental importance in climatology and meterology, and, since they influence radio-wave propagation, they also impact on several other fields, including geodesy, navigational satellite and radioastronomy. The last section presents an overview of new technologies and plans for future missions.

Table of Contents:
Remote sensing of the Earth's surface Ocean surface and wind speed 1. Sea surface parameters retrieval by passive microwave polarimetry 2. Comparison of the sea surface brightness temperature measured during the Coastal Ocean Probing Experiment (COPE'95) from a blimp with model calculations 3. Determination of ocean surface wind speeds from the TRMM Microwave Imager 4. Ocean winds measured by an imaging, polarimetric radiometer 5. Interference effects in freshwater and sea ice 6. A comparison of the errors associated with the retrieval of the latent heat flux from individual SSM/I measurements Land surface 7. Airborne passive microwave measurements on agricultural fields 8. A combined two-scale model for microwave emissivities of land surfaces 9. Modelling of the electromagnetic response of geophysical media with complicated geometries: Analytical and numerical approaches 10. Faraday rotation and passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture from space 11. On simultaneous optical and passive microwave remote sensing of soil, water and vegetation 12. Application of physically-based models of land surface processes in the interpretation of passive microwave radiometry 13. Detection of ice sheet on asphalt roads Remote Sensing of Atmosphere Ground based observations 14. Resolution and accuracy of a multi-frequency scanning radiometer for temperature profiling 15. Implications of an improved atmospheric absorption model on water vapor retrievals 16. Analysis of tip cal methods for ground-based microwave radiometric sensing of water vapor and clouds 17. Observations of integrated water vapor and cloud liquid water at the SHEBA ice station 18. Measurement of plentiful water vapor and cloud liquid water around precipitation area 19. Characteristics of atmospheric water on measurements of ground based microwave radiometer and rain recorder 20. Using a micro-rain radar to assess the editing of ground-based microwave radiometer data 21. Microwave ground based unattended system for cloud parameters monitoring 22. Statistical analysis of the tropospheric radio-path delay using radiosonde and ground-based radiometric data 23. First results of tropospheric transmission measurements at 94 and 212 GHz Satellite observations 24. Influence of cloud temperature on the retrieval of integrated cloud liquid water content from space radiometry 25. Analysis of cloud liquid water content characteristics from SSMI and ship-borne radiometer 26. Estimation of water vapor vertical distribution over the sea from Meteosat and SSM/I Observations 27. Effects of AMSU-A cross track asymmetry of brightness temperatures on retrieval of atmospheric and surface parameters 28. Comparison of Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit observations with global atmospheric model temperature and humidity profiles and their impact on the accuracy of numerical weather prediction 29. Radiometric measurements in the 10/50 GHz band for application to radio wave propagation Remote Sensing of Clouds and Precipitations Radiative transfer models 30. Effects of aspherical ice and liquid hydrometeors on microwave brightness temperature 31. Effects of heterogeneous precipitating atmospheres on simulated brightness temperatures 32. Determination of cloud structure from spacebome microwave observations 33. Modelling and measurements of Stokes vector microwave emission and scattering for a precipitating atmosphere 34. Polarimetric radiometry of rain events: theoretical prediction and experimental results Satellite and ground based observations 35. Application of AMSU for obtaining hydrological parameters 36. Meteorological applications of precipitation estimation from combined SSM/I, TRMM and infrared geostationary satellite data 37. SOM network-based retrieval algorithms for determining precipitable water and rainfall over oceans from the SSM/I measurements 38. Analysis of selected TRMM observations of heavy precipitation events 39. Multi sensor analysis of Friuli flood event (October 5–7, 1998) 40. SSM/I data analysis for retrieving cloud properties: comparisons with ground-based measurements 41. Rainfall retrieval from ground-based multichannel microwave radiometers New Radiometric Instruments and Missions Microwave sensors and calibration 42. An airborne submm radiometer for the observation of stratospheric trace gases 43. EMCOR: A new radiometer for the measurement of minor constituents in the frequency range of 201 to 210 GHz 44. The radiometer for atmospheric measurements (RAM) 45. Automatic self-calibration of ARM microwave radiometers 46. Analog correlator for HUT polarimetric radiometer 47. A method for calibrating the ground-based triple-channel microwave radiometer 48. Calibration methods in large interferometric radiometers devoted to Earth observation Remote sensing missions 49. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission: An overview 50. Field of view characteristics of a 2-D interferometric antenna, as illustrated by the MIRAS/ SMOS L-band concept 51. Retrieval capabilities of L-band 2-D interferometric radiometry over land surfaces (SMOS Mission) 52. The role of microwave radiometry in the CLOUDS project 53. Non-linear inversion of Odin sub-mm observations in the lower stratosphere by neural networks AMSR 54. Progress in AMSR snow algorithm development 55. Retrieval of soil moisture from AMSR data 56. AMSR/AMSR-E algorithm developments in NASDA—water vapor, cloud liquid water, sea surface wind speed, and SST 57. Resampling of AMSR observations for spatial resolution matching

About the Author :
Pampaloni\, ; Paloscia\,