A detailed study of land surface microwave emissivity over the Indian subcontinent

Abstract

Microwave emissivities of land surfaces on global basis have been derived using Special Sensor Microwave/Imager brightness temperature data. These derived emissivities are compared with other reported emissivity values to demonstrate the accuracy of the retrievals. Following these results, detailed analyses on the microwave emissivities of the Indian subcontinent are carried out using the monthly mean emissivity estimate for two years. The Indian subcontinent has a wide variety of geographic and biospheric classes with distinctly different emissivity characteristics. The spectral and monthly variations of microwave emissivity for different tropical land surface classes are examined. This study is significant for microwave radiance assimilation in weather forecast models and also for the utilization of the data from passive microwave sensors onboard the Indo-French satellite “Megha-Tropiques,” which is dedicated to tropical atmospheric studies.