Water vapor plays an important roles in the Earth's energy and water cycles. Compared to optical remote sensing, microwave remote sensing has the advantage to acquire information of atmosphere under cloudy condition. Up to now, there is no published reliable total precipitable water product over land from AMSR2 due to effect of high land surface emissivity in microwave band. In this study, an improved total precipitable water retrieved algorithm for AMSR2 will be developed based on previous studies. In the retrieval algorithm, a land surface emissivity parameter estimation model is developed using combination of AMSR2 and MODIS observation. The precisely estimated surface emissivity parameter is the key parameter in the retrieval of total precipitable water. Finally, the total precipitable water was retrieved using a look-up table, and it is validated using total precipitable water observed from global distributed GPS.
['Dabin Ji', 'Jiancheng Shi', 'Chuan Xiong', 'Tianxing Wang', 'Tianjie Zhao']
A total precipitable water retrieval algorithm over land using AMSR2