Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Sea Surface Wind

Product Summary

Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Sea Surface Wind 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 Sea Surface Wind (SSW). SSW is retrieved mainly from 36.5 GHz vertical (V) and horizontal (H) brightness temperature of AMSR by a graphical method. The retrieval is restricted to no rain condition since the brightness temperature of 36.5 GHz is saturated under rainy condition, SSW obtained only from 36.5 GHz has a large anisotropic feature depending on an angle between antenna direction and wind direction. Its anisotropic feature is corrected by using two data from 36.5 and 10.65 GHz, since 10.65 GHz data are less anisotropic. Even under rainy condition, 10.65 and 6.925 GHZ data are not saturated, so wind speed is retrieved by using those H data. Retrieval accuracy of wind speed using 10.65 and 6.925 GHz becomes worse than using 36.5 GHz, since a sensitivity of 10.65 and 6.925 GHz to wind speed is not so strong. 36.5 GHz data is used for the algorithm of standard products processing. 6.925 GHz and 10.65 GHz data are used for research product, which is provided from EORC. The physical quantity unit is m/s.
Also, the quality flag for each observation point (Pixel Data Quality) is stored.
The provided format is HDF5. Spatial resolution is 10 km. The current version of the product is "Version 7". 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