Summary

Description

This Level 2 (swath) data set’s land surface parameters, surface soil moisture, land surface (skin) temperature, and vegetation water content, are derived from passive microwave remote sensing data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI), using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). Each swath is packaged with associated geolocation fields. The data set covers the period from December 1997 to present, at the spatial resolution (nominally 45 km) of TMI's X band (10.7 GHz). The data are stored in netCDF format. The LPRM is based on a forward radiative transfer model to retrieve surface soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. The land surface temperature is derived separately from TMI's Ka-band (37 GHz). A unique feature of this method is that it can be applied at any microwave frequency, making it very suitable to exploit all the available passive microwave data from various satellites. Input data are from the TMI Brightness Temperatures (1B-11) product, archived at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC).