Project Title
A Hydrologically-Consistent Multi-Satellite Climatology of Evaporation, Precipitation, and Water Vapor Transport Over the Oceans, PI: Frank Wentz
Focus of this Work
The central goal of NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study (NEWS) is "to document and enable improved, observationally-based, predictions of energy and water cycle consequences of Earth system variability and change." We made progress towards this goal through our contributions to the development and assessment of a basin scale water cycle climatology.
Delivered Product
The Version-01b Passive Microwave Water Cycle (PMWC) Dataset was produced for the NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study (NEWS). The PMWC data product provides a full characterization of the atmospheric branch of the water cycle over the ocean, including the parameters: water vapor, water vapor transport (speed and direction), water vapor transport divergence, evaporation, and precipitation.
More Info
Reading routines for FORTRAN, IDL, Matlab, and Python are available in the support folder. Further information on the data file format is available in the readme.txt file. A verification file is provided to confirm that the data files are being read correctly.
The methodology used to produce the PMWC product is documented in: Hilburn, K. A., (2009), The passive microwave water cycle product, report number 072409, Remote Sensing Systems, 30 pp.
An intercomparison of PMWC with Liu and Xie Version-3 moisture convergence product and the Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) vertically integrated specific humidity is documented in: Hilburn, K. A., (2010), Intercomparison of water vapor transport datasets. Abstract H31H-1098 presented at 2010 Fall Meeting, AGU, San Francisco, CA, 13-17 December.
Please note PMWC Version-01b was produced using Version-6 SSM/I retrievals from F08, F10, F11, F13, F14, and F15.
This work is pertinent to the following missions: SSMI
This work is pertinent to the following measurements: sst, wind, vapor, rain