MT-MADRAS Brightness Temperature analysis for Terrain Characterization and Land Surface Microwave Emissivity Estimation

This article reports the potential of the 'MADRAS' payload on-board the Megha-Tropiques satellite for land surface studies. The analysis has been divided into two parts as application of MADRAS data for studying the land surface properties and estimation of microwave emissivity directly from MADRAS brightness temperature (TB) data by applying an in-house developed Microwave Radiative Transfer Computation Code. The derived emissivity is further used to characterize the microwave emissivity of different land surface classes. The polarization difference (PD) parameters, the difference between horizontal (H-) and vertical (V-) polarization of TBs at 18 and 36 GHz clearly discern surface features of different surface classes such as deserts, arid/semi-arid and vegetated regions. Land surface microwave emissivity for MADRAS channels is derived on a global basis. These are inter-compared with the emissivity derived from the operational TRMM Microwave Imager and are in reasonably good agreement. The analysis based on emissivity shows spectral variation for different surface classes.