Intercalibration of FY-3C MWRI Over Forest Warm-Scenes Based on Microwave Radiative Transfer Model

In order to cover the warm end of Earth-scene brightness temperature (TB) range of passive microwave radiometers, intercalibration over warm scenes is necessary. This article presents a methodology to intercalibrate the microwave radiation imager (MWRI) on the Chinese second-generation meteorological satellite Fengyun 3C (FY-3C) with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI) over the warm scenes of dense forests using the double-difference (DD) method. Based on the microwave radiative transfer model (RTM), an intercalibration method is developed, in which a modified land surface emissivity (LSE) model for dense forests is proposed. The forests with optically thick canopy are identified in terms of polarization TB differences and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) extracted from the latest vegetation product of Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The matching TBs between FY-3C MWRI and GMI over dense forest warm scenes are collected and analyzed together with the TBs over ocean surfaces obtained by Zeng and Jiang (2020). The results show that: 1) FY-3C MWRI’s observations are generally underestimated, and the intercalibration biases are polynomial functions of observations; 2) the intercalibration biases at the warm end are relatively smaller than those at the cold end; and 3) the calibration in the ascending orbits (MWRIA) is relatively better than that in the descending orbits (MWRID). At the tropical rain forest scene TBs defined in this work, the intercalibration biases (mean ± standard deviation at the mean) in the FY-3C MWRI channels of 10 V, 10 H, 18 V, 18 H, 23 V, 36 V, 36 H, 89 V, and 89 H are, respectively, −1.3 ± 0.7, −1.9 ± 1.1, 1.6 ± 0.6, 2.5 ± 0.8, −0.2 ± 0.5, −2.0 ± 0.6, −2.4 ± 0.7, −0.2 ± 0.6, and −0.1 ± 0.6 K for the ascending orbits, while they are, respectively, −4.0 ± 0.8, −5.4 ± 1.2, −1.4 ± 0.7, −1.2 ± 0.8, −2.9 ± 0.5, −4.9 ± 0.7, −5.5 ± 0.7, −2.7 ± 0.8, and −2.3 ± 0.7 K for the descending orbits. The in-orbit calibration coefficients of GMI are successfully transferred to FY-3C MWRI.