Airborne Retrievals of Snow Microwave Emissivity at AMSU Frequencies Using ARTS/SCEM-UA

The remote sounding, by satellite, of atmospheric temperature and humidity is an important source of data for assimilation into operational weather forecasting routines. For retrievals of these variables near the surface, wavebands with low optical depths are monitored to allow penetration through the overlying atmosphere. Brightness temperatures in these relatively transparent bands are also sensitive to the land surface emissivity and effective temperature. Inadequate understanding of these land surface emissivities is a major issue when assimilating Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit data for the land-covered portion of the globe. One approach for estimating the emissivity of snow-covered surfaces is an empirical model derived from satellite-based and land-based retrievals of emissivity for a variety of snow types. The Met Office’s Hercules C-130 aircraft flew over snow-covered Arctic terrain of northern Finland during the Polar Experiment (POLEX) of March 2001. On these flights, microwave radiometers provided microwave brightness temperatures at 23.8, 50.3, 89.0, 157, and 183 GHz. The work presented here uses these data along with a robust multiparameter optimization routine [Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis (SCEM-UA)] coupled to the Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator (ARTS) to retrieve emissivities at the measured frequencies. These results are then used to validate an empirical model. This latter model predicts 23.8–157-GHz emissivities with an RMSE of less than 0.02 and bias of less than 0.01 when compared with data at an incidence angle of 40°. Nonmonotonic behavior in the emissivity spectrum for this campaign, reported in earlier work, is confirmed by the retrievals presented here.