1. Emissivity-Based Products: Current Status and Plans MIRS Monthly Meeting 3 October 2008 C. Grassotti

2. Emissivity-Based Products: Current Monitoring and Validation MIRS Methodology: Emissivity retrieved directly, derived products based on postprocessing and library of pre-computed lookup tables (combination of physical and semi-empirical models) Current EDRs: Sea Ice Conc (FY+MY), Snow Cover (SWE,SGS), Sfc type Current Monitoring/Validation: Real-time comparison with heritage (MSPPS) algorithms Advantages: same sensors, therefore temporally and spatially collocated observations, rapid Disadvantages: MW-based, same error characteristics? Limited to MSPPS products intercomparison

3. Emissivity-Based Products: Future Monitoring and Validation AMSR-E L3 daily snow and ice products: SIC (NASA T2, Bootstrap) on 12 km p.s. grid, SWE on 25 km EASE grid. –Advantage: produced globally, SIC (day, night, daily), SWE (daily) –Disadvantage: MW products w/same biases as MIRS and MSPPS. IMS Analyses (NIC) produced on 4 km grid: –Advantage: produced daily with human analyst intervention; multisensor ~independent (?) of MW-only products; high-res –Disadvantage: snow and ice cover only, no snow microphysical or ice age information ASI (IEP, Bremen) Sea Ice products on 6 km p.s. grid: –Advantage: higher resolution, good for localized evaluations –Disadvantage: ice only, uses AMSR-E 89 GHz only (atmospheric effects?) Suggestions?

4. Emissivity-Based Products: Planned software enhancements Current system: emissivity retrieved directly, then converted to snow or ice products via sensor-specific look-up tables/libraries (computed off-line) –Disadvantage: less flexible, not easily extendable; new sensors can require significant sw development and off-line calculations (e.g. frequency, viewing geometry); need to plan for NPP ATMS, NPOESS MIS, etc. Planned updates: –Rederive look-up tables/libraries to span likely range of current and future sensors –New software more general; read in general libraries first, and extract sensor-specific parameters on the fly