JISAO data

Remote Sensing Systems SSM/I estimates of water vapor, cloud water, precipitation, and 10-m wind speeds
May 1987 through July 2002

Introduction and images | Data




The special sensor microwave / imager (SSM/I) has flown on 6
satellites, and several of the satellites are for overlapping
periods.  The 
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) group has processed SSM/I observations to produce water vapor, cloud water, 10-m wind speed, and precipitation esimates. On the RSS WWW site you can download data and images for the individual satellites. I have averaged the available data for each year and month, and images of this merged data are provided on the present WWW page.

Annual means
global domain
PostScript | JPEG

global domain
PostScript | JPEG

global domain
PostScript | JPEG

global domain
PostScript | JPEG

References:
  • Wentz F. J. 1997, A well-calibrated ocean algorithm for SSM/I, J. Geophys. Res., 102, C4, 8703-8718.
  • Wentz, F. J. and R. W. Spencer, 1998: SSM/I Rain retrievals within a unified all-weather ocean algorithm, J. Atmos. Sci., 55, 1613-1627.

    Data:
    The resolution of the native data is 0.25-degree latitude-longitude resolution, and I have averaged the data into 0.5-degree latitide-longitude resolution to make the data set more compact. Even this is too big to perform much in the way of analyses of years and months.

    If you are on the University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences computers, you can access the netCDF files. If you are not, you will have to go to the Remote Sensing Systems WWW page and download and process the data.

    At JISAO:
    /home/disk/muggy/data/ssmi/rss
    The gzipped files are 398 Mbytes in size when unzipped, and the 0.5-degree latitude-longitude resolution files are 99 Mbytes.
    cloudwaterssmirss19872002.0.5-deg.nc
    cloudwaterssmirss19872002.nc.gz
    precipssmirss19872002.0.5-deg.nc
    precipssmirss19872002.nc.gz
    precipssmirssclim.nc 1988-2001 precipitation climatology
    sfcspeedssmirss19872002.0.5-deg.nc
    sfcspeedssmirss19872002.nc.gz
    watervaporssmirss19872002.0.5-deg.nc
    watervaporssmirss19872002.nc.gz

    
    

    October 2002
    Todd Mitchell
    (mitchell@atmos.washington.edu)
    JISAO data