MERITS OF COMBINATION OF ACTIVE AND PASSIVE MICROWAVE SENSORS FOR DEVELOPING ALGORITHMS OF SST AND SURFACE WIND SPEED

In developing algorithms to retrieve the sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface wind speed from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) aboard the AQUA and the Advanced Earth Observation Satellite-II (ADEOS-II), data from the SeaWinds aboard ADEOS-II were helpful. Since features of the ocean microwave emission (Tb) related with ocean wind are not well understood, in case of using only AMSR data, combination of AMSR and SeaWinds revealed pronounced features about the ocean Tb. Two results from combinations of the two sensors were shown in this paper. One result was obtained at wind speeds over about 6m/s, in which the ocean Tb varies with the air-sea temperature difference, even though the SeaWinds wind speed is fixed at the same values. The ocean Tb increases as the air-sea temperature difference becomes negative, i.e., the boundary condition becomes unstable. This result indicates that the air temperature should be included in AMSR SST algorithm. The second result was obtained from comparison of two wind speeds between AMSR and SeaWinds. There is a small difference of two wind speeds, which might be related with several mechanisms, such as evaporation and plankton.