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Validation is an important and particularly challenging task for remote sensing of soil moisture. A key issue in the validation of soil moisture products is the disparity in spatial scales between satellite and in situ observations. Conventional measurements of soil moisture are made at a point, whereas satellite sensors provide an integrated area/volume value for a much larger spatial extent. In this paper, four soil moisture networks were developed and used as part of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) validation program. Each network is located in a different climatic region of the U.S., and provides estimates of the average soil moisture over highly instrumented experimental watersheds and surrounding areas that approximate the size of the AMSR-E footprint. Soil moisture measurements have been made at these validation sites on a continuous basis since 2002, which provided a seven-year period of record for this analysis. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) standard soil moisture products were compared to the network observations, along with two alternative soil moisture products developed using the single-channel algorithm (SCA) and the land parameter retrieval model (LPRM). The metric used for validation is the root-mean-square error (rmse) of the soil moisture estimate as compared to the in situ data. The mission requirement for accuracy defined by the space agencies is 0.06 \m^3/\m^3. The statistical results indicate that each algorithm performs differently at each site. Neither the NASA nor the JAXA standard products provide reliable estimates for all the conditions represented by the four watershed sites. The JAXA algorithm performs better than the NASA algorithm under light-vegetation conditions, but the NASA algorithm is more reliable for moderate vegetation. However, both algorithms have a moderate to large bias in all cases. The SCA had the lowest overall rmse with a small bias. The LPRM had a very large overestimation bias and retrieval errors. When site-specific corrections were applied, all algorithms had approximately the same error level and correlation. These results clearly show that there is much room for improvement in the algorithms currently in use by JAXA and NASA. They also illustrate the potential pitfalls in using the products without a careful evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ice concentration retrieved from spaceborne passive-microwave observations is a prime input to operational sea-ice-monitoring programs, numerical weather prediction models, and global climate models. Atmospheric Environment Service (AES)-York and the Enhanced National Aeronautics and Space Administration Team (NT2) are two algorithms that calculate ice concentration from Special Sensor Microwave/Imager observations. This paper furnishes a comparison between ice concentrations (total, thin, and thick types) output from NT2 and AES-York algorithms against the corresponding estimates from the operational analysis of Radarsat images in the Canadian Ice Service (CIS). A new data fusion technique, which incorporates the actual sensor's footprint, was developed to facilitate this study. Results have shown that the NT2 and AES-York algorithms underestimate total ice concentration by 18.35% and 9.66% concentration counts on average, with 16.8% and 15.35% standard deviation, respectively. However, the retrieved concentrations of thin and thick ice are in much more discrepancy with the operational CIS estimates when either one of these two types dominates the viewing area. This is more likely to occur when the total ice concentration approaches 100 %. If thin and thick ice types coexist in comparable concentrations, the algorithms' estimates agree with CIS's estimates. In terms of ice concentration retrieval, thin ice is more problematic than thick ice. The concept of using a single tie point to represent a thin ice surface is not realistic and provides the largest error source for retrieval accuracy. While AES-York provides total ice concentration in slightly more agreement with CIS's estimates, NT2 provides better agreement in retrieving thin and thick ice concentrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) is one of four instruments onboard the Earth Observing System Aura satellite. The TES Science Investigator-led Processing System (SIPS) Facility performs production processing of all TES science data. When the TES project was proposed in 1988, its science algorithms were still evolving, but it was already understood to be at least two orders of magnitude more complex than its NASA predecessor, the Atmospheric Trace Molecule Spectroscopy (ATMOS) instrument. In addition, the expected data volume of the TES instrument would be more than 1000 times greater than that of ATMOS. Development of the TES SIPS faced a number of technical challenges. It also would have been impractical and prohibitively costly to develop the TES SIPS facility without carefully deploying the computing technologies that have recently become available. This paper describes how the challenges were met in the development of the facility by making use of evolving hardware technology and software refinement. The process revealed that the architecture of the hardware implemented was highly dependent upon the processing algorithm, and a stable algorithm was needed early in the hardware development process for performance analysis and benchmarking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on EOS/Aura offers unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution, coupled with global coverage, for space-based UV measurements of sulfur dioxide (SO2). This paper describes an OMI SO2 algorithm (the band residual difference) that uses calibrated residuals at SO2 absorption band centers produced by the NASA operational ozone algorithm (OMTO3). By using optimum wavelengths for retrieval of SO2, the retrieval sensitivity is improved over NASA predecessor Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) by factors of 10 to 20, depending on location. The ground footprint of OMI is eight times smaller than TOMS. These factors produce two orders of magnitude improvement in the minimum detectable mass of SO2. Thus, the diffuse boundaries of volcanic clouds can be imaged better and the clouds can be tracked longer. More significantly, the improved sensitivity now permits daily global measurement of passive volcanic degassing of SO2 and of heavy anthropogenic SO2 pollution to provide new information on the relative importance of these sources for climate studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earth Observing System (EOS) Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) is an atmospheric remote sensing experiment led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. The objectives of the EOS MLS are to learn more about stratospheric chemistry and causes of ozone changes, processes affecting climate variability, and pollution in the upper troposphere. The EOS MLS is one of four instruments on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) EOS Aura spacecraft launched on July 15, 2004, with an operational period extending at least 5 years after launch. This paper describes the architecture and capabilities of the Science Data Processing System (SDPS) for the EOS MLS. The SDPS consists of two major component—the Science Computing Facility and the Science Investigator-led Processing System. The Science Computing Facility provides the facilities for the EOS MLS Science Team to perform the functions of scientific algorithm development, processing software development, quality control of data products, and scientific analyses. The Science Investigator-led Processing System processes and reprocesses the science data for the entire mission and delivers the data products to the Science Computing Facility and to the Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Science Distributed Active Archive Center, which archives and distributes the standard science products. The Science Investigator-led Processing System is developed and operated by Raytheon Information Technology and Scientific Services of Pasadena under contract with Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]