Regional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models provide enhanced detail for forecast quantities such as cloud cover, visibility and rainfall. Previous work at the Met Office has shown that improving the humidity analysis through the assimilation of AMSU radiances improves the accuracy of these quantities. This paper highlights several new developments in the assimilation of AMSU-B radiances ...

We describe a simulation methodology used to develop and validate precipitation retrieval algorithms for current and future passive microwave sounders with emphasis on the NPOESS (National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System) sensors. Precipitation algorithms are currently being developed for ATMS, MIS, and NAST-M. ATMS, like AMSU, will have channels near the oxygen bands ...

We describe a simulation methodology used to develop and validate precipitation retrieval algorithms for current and future passive microwave sounders with emphasis on the NPOESS (National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System) sensors. Precipitation algorithms are currently being developed for ATMS, MIS, and NAST-M. ATMS, like AMSU, will have channels near the oxygen bands ...

The Mediterranean region is characterized by its vulnerability to changes in the water cycle, with the impact of global warming on the water resources being one of the major concerns in social, economical and scientific ambits. Even if precipitation is the best-known term of the Mediterranean water budget, large uncertainties remain due to the lack of suitable offshore observational data. In th...

The NOAA-15 weather satellite carries the Advanced Microwave Sounding Units-A and -B (AMSU-A, AMSU-B) which measure thermal emission from an atmospheric oxygen band, two water lines, and several window frequencies. An iterated minimum-variance algorithm retrieves profiles of temperature and humidity in the atmosphere from this data. Relative humidity is converted into absolute humidity with use...

The images acquired by microwave sensors are blurry and have low resolution. On the other hand, the images obtained using infrared/visible sensors are often of higher resolution. In this paper, we develop a data fusion methodology and apply it to enhance the resolution of a microwave image using the data from a collocated infrared/visible sensor. Such an approach takes advantage of the spatial ...

A physically based retrieval algorithm was developed to estimate snowfall over land. The retrieval algorithm relies on the MM5 model that generates the vertical structure of a snow cloud, including snow mass, snow particle effective diameter, and water vapor. The MM5 cloud simulation was used to provide statistics for generating the cloud characteristics. The snow cloud profile and surface emis...

The Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Aperture Radiometer (GeoSTAR) is a microwave atmospheric sounder, with capabilities similar to those of the AMSU-A/B system, and is intended for deployment in geostationary orbit – where it will complement future infrared sounders t o enable all-weather temperature and humidity soundings. It also has the capability of mapping rain rates, and it can be deploye...