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Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder
AMSRE Enhanced Resolution Image Product Users Notes


This page is designed as a dynamic repository of relevant information to aid users of AMSR-E enhanced resolution image products. Additional information is available here as a pdf document.

This page is still in development...

Enhanced resolution images made from AMSR data use two different forms of single-variate the Scatterometer Image Reconstruction (SIR) algorithm adapted for SSM/I and the AVE algorithm. Non-enhanced resolution images are produced by gridding data, computing the mean and STD of all the measurements hitting each grid element, then pixel replicating the values to the same grid resolution as the SIR or AVE images. The effective pixel resolution of NON images is 5 grid elements.

For SIR and AVE, multiple passes of the spacecraft are combined to produce a higher spatial resolution (at a cost of reduced temporal resolution). Orbits are combined into local-time-of-day images to optimize the temporal and spatial resolution...

AMSR-E is a six frequency conically scanning radioometer. Each frequency makes measurements at V and H polarization.

AMSR- data was obtained from AE_L2A.002 data obtained from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The non-resample Tb values from this data set were used with the calibrations provided. The 89 GHz channels were recalibrated. using the values provided in the NSIDC documentation.

Images are produced in the BYU .SIR file format, using the standard naming scheme. The files are gzipped to minimize storage and transfer requirements. The standard images are designed for land and ice observation and so are landmasked. However, .SIR format land mask files (containing 0 for ocean and 1 for land) are available for each standard region. .SIR format images containing "images" of the latitude and longitude of each pixel for each region are also available.

Due to its polar orbit, the local-time-of-day of the AMSR observations varies with latitude and direction of the orbit. At mid- to low-latitudes, most areas are imaged at two different local times-of-day -- one for the ascending (north-bound) pass and one for the descending (south-bound) pass. Thus, by separating the data into ascending and descending passes, images corresponding to two different local times-of-day are created. In the polar regions, particular locations are observed at multiple local times-of-day and so a different method is required. Local time-of-day is considered in more detail in a MERS research report (pdf) on temporal resolution for AMSRE at the poles (pdf).