Summary

Description

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is a joint U.S.-Japan satellite mission to monitor tropical and subtropical precipitation and to estimate its associated latent heating. TRMM was successfully launched on November 27, at 4:27 PM (EST) from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The Visible and Infrared Scanner (VIRS) is a five-channel visible/infrared radiometer, which builds on the heritage of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument flown aboard the NOAA series of Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES). The VIRS detects radiation at 1 visible, 2 near infrared and 2 thermal infrared wavelengths, allowing determination of cloud coverage, cloud top height and temperature, and precipitation indices. The central wavelengths for the VIRS channels are 0.63, 1.60, 3.75, 10.8, and 12.0 microns. All channels are in operation during the daytime, but only channels 3, 4 and 5 operate during the nighttime. The Level 1A product file (1A01) is a concatenation of the Level 0 data with a header record and, as such, is reversible to Level 0. The header record contains information pertaining to orbit times, orbit number, times of the first scan, and number of scans, among other things. The Level 0 data contain the actual channel data expressed as "sensor counts". A Level 1A file contains data for a single orbit and has a file size of about 31 MB (uncompressed). There are 16 files of VIRS 1A01 data produced per day. Spatial coverage is between 38 degrees North and 38 degrees South owing to the 35 degree inclination of the TRMM satellite. This orbit provides extensive coverage in the tropics and allows each location to be covered at a different local time each day, enabling the analysis of the diurnal cycle of precipitation.