Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Cloud Liquid Water

Product Summary

Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Cloud Liquid Water dataset is obtained from the AMSR-E sensor onboard Aqua and produced by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Aqua of NASA was launched on May 4th, 2002 in Sun-synchronous sub-recurrent Orbit. Aqua observes various kinds of physical phenomena related to water and energy circulation from space. Aqua data promoted the research activities for interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and lands, and their effects on climate changes.
AMSR-E scans the Earth's surface by mechanically rotating the antenna and acquires radiance data of the Earth's surface. Each frequency band is monitored by vertical and horizontal polarized wave. It conically scans and keeps an angle of incidence on the earth surface (a nominal of 55 degrees) and accomplishes a swath width of about 1450 km. The AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for regular observations, and the AMSR-E restarted its observation in slow rotation mode (2 rotations per minute) on December 4, 2012. However, the AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for slow rotation mode and it automatically halted its observation and rotation on December 4, 2015.
Level 2 product stores the Geophysical quantity from the brightness temperature of level 1 product.
This product includes Integrated cloud liquid water (CLW). CLW is calculated from brightness temperature of 10 channels (5frequencies X 2 polarization) by using a Linear Statistical Regression (LSR) algorithm. In this processing, a combination of coefficients is utilized and these are specified in accordance with a simulation in which brightness temperatures for a wide variety of ocean scenes (sea surface temperature, wind speed, water vapor and cloud liquid water) are computed by the Radiative Transfer Model (RTM). These coefficients were found such that the rms difference between estimated value and the true value for the specified environmental scene was minimized If the value of cloud liquid water is above 0.18 mm, it flags the observation as having rain. The physical quantity unit is kg/m^2.
Also, the quality flag for each observation point (Pixel Data Quality) is stored.
The provided format is HDF4. Spatial resolution is 10 km. The current version of the product is "Version 4". The generation unit is scene (defined as a half orbit).

Platform

Aqua

Sensor

AMSR-E

Coverage

Temporal Coverage

2002-06-01 to 2011-10-05

Spatial Coverage

Bounding Rectangle
(90.0°, -180.0°, -90.0°, 180.0°)

Resolution

10 km

Location

• GLOBAL > GLOBAL OCEAN