Inter-Sensor Calibration between HY-2B and AMSR2 Passive Microwave Data in Land Surface and First Result for Snow Water Equivalent Retrieval

Abstract

The self-designed HaiYang-2B (HY-2B) satellite was launched on 24 October 2018 in China at 22:57 UT in a 99.34° inclination sun-synchronous orbit. The Scanning Microwave Radiometer (SMR) on the core observatory has the capability to provide near-real-time multi-channel brightness temperature (Tb) observations, which are designed mainly for improving the level of marine forecasting and monitoring, serving the development and utilization of marine resources. After internal calibration and ocean calibration, the first effort to retrieve land surface snow parameters was performed in this study, which obtained extremely low accuracy both in snow extent and snow mass. Accordingly, land inter-sensor calibration was carried out between SMR and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) in order to broaden the research and application of SMR data on the Earth’s land surface. Finally, we evaluated the consistency of the snow extent and snow mass derived from the initial and land-calibrated SMR data. The results indicated that a systematic SMR cold deviation whose magnitude depends on the channel is present for all the compared channels. After intercalibration, the conformity of the snow extent and snow mass were substantially improved compared to before; the relative bias of the snow extent and snow mass decreased from −49.97% to 2.97% and from −51.71% to 3.01%, respectively.