Radiometric validation of the TRMM Microwave Imager 1B11 V8 brightness temperature product

The Tropical Rainfall Measurements Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI), has served as the radiometric transfer standard for the TRMM constellation radiometers for over 17 years. The final legacy processing for the TMI is in progress for the TMI 1B11 Tb Version-8 (V8), which will be released in late 2017. This paper presents a radiometric evaluation of the Tb differences between the current TMI Version-7 (V7) and the newly derived V8 dataset. For this evaluation, we perform an inter-satellite radiometric calibration (XCAL) between the Global Precipitation Mission Microwave Imager (GMI) Tb product and TMI Tb products for both V7 and V8. The results of XCAL using different datasets are compared to assess the TMI V8 calibration biases relative to V7.