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Science Meetings

Global Atmospheric Products (Level 3) for MWR Microwave Radiometer
Heredia, S.D., Masuelli, S., and Madero, F. (17-Nov-15)

On board the SAC-D / Aquarius satellite, there are 8 instruments developed according to specific objectives. One of such instrument is the MWR microwave radiometer. This is a push broom Dicke radiometer with three channels operating in the K (H-Pol 23.8 GHz) and Ka (36.5 GHz, H & V-Pol) bands. This instrument has 16 beams 8 forward-looking (36.5 GHz) and 8 aft-looking (23.8 GHz). Its aim is the indirect measurement of geophysical parameters: water vapor column, rain rate, wind speed and ice concentration. SAC-D/Aquarius mission was designed to provide weekly global map of sea surface salinity. In this way MWR has the capability to produce these weekly information for its retrieved geophysical variables. There are many different ways to generate a level 3 (L3) global coverage products for satellite sensors. In general, these are generated by the use of a set of level 2 (L2) products of the variable, making a statistical processing of the data on a grid for a certain period of time. In this way, the selection of the grid is one of the most important issues to be fixed for the L3 product generation. In this work we show the operative L3 products for the geophysical variables Water Vapor (WV), surface Wind Speed (WS) and Rain Rate (RR) developed in CONAE.