RETRIEVAL AND PROCESSING OF ATMOSPHERIC PARAMETERS FROM SATELLITE DATA

Remote sensing of earth on passive microwave channels enables one to e stimate the atmospheric parameters over oceans on a repetitive basis t hroughout the year. Such a data base forms a useful tool in the study of complex weather phenomena. With India's plans to include a microwav e radiometer on board the forthcoming satellite Oceansat-1 in 1998, th ere will be increasing interest among oceanographers and meteorologist s to use the satellite-derived meteorological parameters in weather st udies, especially the Indian monsoon. This paper proposes a standard m ethod to retrieve or unpack the atmospheric parameters from microwave satellite data, average them over a week, map them into 1 degrees x 1 degrees grid and display them either as plots of equal intensities or as colour coded images. The complete source code in FORTRAN 77 for per forming each of the above tasks is available at the IAMG anonymous ftp site for the benefit of potential users. As an example, we present re sults for the sea surface winds and atmospheric water vapour over the tropical Indian ocean for the months of January 1989 obtained by using the method described in the paper. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.