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Rapid calibration of HY-2A satellite-borne microwave radiometer using coastal GNSS observations

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Abstract

Satellite-borne microwave radiometers provide wet tropospheric correction (WTC) for altimetry observations, which is critical to high-accuracy sea surface height (SSH) measurements. However, it was reported that the Haiyang-2A (HY-2A) calibration microwave radiometer (CMR) experienced abrupt 18.7 GHz band failure. The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) can provide (near) real-time accurate WTC with high temporal resolutions. In this study, GNSS observations of 132 global coastal sites from January 2017 to February 2018 are used for CMR validation and calibration. In addition, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) products during the same period are also used for comparison. After calibration with GNSS observations, the root-mean-square (RMS) of the WTC differences between CMR and ECMWF decreases from 2.53 to 1.66 cm. After calibration with ECMWF products, the RMS of the WTC differences between ECMWF-calibrated CMR and ECMWF is 1.54 cm. Moreover, different processing strategies of WTC are applied to SSH measurements. The mean sea level anomaly (SLA) values of SSH obtained with ECMWF-calibrated CMR are comparable to those obtained with GNSS-calibrated CMR WTC and with ECMWF WTC. In addition, compared to the SLAs of Jason-3, the SLAs of HY-2A obtained with ECMWF WTC show the smallest differences of 7.79 cm in RMS, which are 0.1 cm smaller than those obtained with ECMWF-calibrated CMR WTC and 0.23 cm smaller than those obtained with GNSS-calibrated CMR WTC. The SLAs obtained with original CMR WTC are reduced by approximately 0.8 cm in RMS after using GNSS-calibrated CMR WTC. Therefore, even with the known limitations of ground-based GNSS (non-collocated measurements over land instead of over ocean), it can indeed serve as a valuable WTC source for radiometer calibration due to the lower latency of GNSS observations.

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Data availability

Coastal GNSS original observations are available at http://cddis.nasa.gov/archive/gnss/data, VMF3 WTC data are available at http://vmf.geo.tuwien.ac.at, and the GNSS ZWD, VMF3 WTC and HY-2A CMR data in crossover points are available at http://igmas.users.sgg.whu.edu.cn/group/tool/11. The HY-2A dataset is also available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank NSOAS for providing the HY-2A data, TU Wien for providing the VMF3 grid data, IGS for providing the GNSS observations and GFZ for providing the precise orbit and clock products. Dynamic atmospheric corrections are produced by CLS using the Mog2D model from Legos and distributed by Aviso+, MSS_CNES_CLS15 is produced by CLS and distributed by Aviso+ with support from CNES, and Jason-3 GDR is distributed by Aviso+ with support from CNES. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41876106, 41974029 and 42004030), the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFC3000504 and 2020YFB0505805), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2042021kf0005), Wenhai Program of Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (2021WHZZB1002) and the Fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M682481). The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. First Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources, Qingdao, 266061, People’s Republic of China

    Zhilu Wu, Yanxiong Liu, Yang Liu & Wenxue Xu

  2. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, People’s Republic of China

    Zhilu Wu & Cuixian Lu

  3. School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nan**g, 210098, People’s Republic of China

    Yanxiong Liu & **ufeng He

  4. Chongqing Branch, Changjiang River Scientific Research Institute, Chongqing, 400026, People’s Republic of China

    Ke **

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Contributions

Z.W., YX.L. and Y.L. provided the initial idea and designed the experiments for this study; Z.W., YX.L., Y.L., C. L. and X. H. analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript; K. J., W. X. helped with the writing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yang Liu.

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Wu, Z., Liu, Y., Liu, Y. et al. Rapid calibration of HY-2A satellite-borne microwave radiometer using coastal GNSS observations. J Geod 96, 24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-022-01617-w

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