A Simplified Coastline Inflection Method for Correcting Geolocation Errors in FengYun-3D Microwave Radiation Imager Images

Abstract

Passive microwave (PMW) sensors are popularly applied to Earth observations. However, the satellite PMW radiometer data sometimes have non-negligible errors in geolocation. Coastline inflection methods (CIMs) are widely used to improve geolocation errors of PMW images. However, they commonly require accuracy satellite flight parameters, which are difficult to obtain by users. In this study, a simplified coastline inflection method (SCIM) is proposed to correct the geolocation errors without demanding for the satellite flight parameters. SCIM is applied to improve geolocation errors of FengYun-3D (FY-3D) Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI) brightness temperature images from 2018 and 2019. It reduces the geolocation errors of MWRI images to 0.15 pixels in the along-track and cross-track direction. This means reductions of 75% and 86% of the geolocation errors, respectively. The mean brightness temperature differences between the ascending and descending MWRI images are reduced by 34%, demonstrating the improved geolocation accuracy of SCIM. The corrected images are also used to estimate Arctic sea ice concentration (SIC). By comparing with SICs retrieved from the un-corrected images, the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) of the SICs from the corrected images are reduced from 13.7% to 10.2% and 8.9% to 6.9%, respectively. The mean correlation coefficient (R) increases from 0.91 to 0.95. All these results indicate that SCIM can reduce geolocation errors of satellite-based PMW images significantly. As SCIM is very simple and easy to be applied, it could be a useful method for users of PMW images.