T. Bellerby et al., RETRIEVAL OF LAND AND SEA BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURES FROM MIXED COASTAL PIXELS IN PASSIVE MICROWAVE DATA, IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 36(6), 1998, pp. 1844-1851
A technique is presented to separate uncontaminated land and sea brigh
tness temperatures from mixed coastal pixels in 37-GHz vertically pola
rized passive microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager
(SSM/I) instrument. Combining a mathematical model of the instrument r
esponse over several neighboring footprints with a GIS representation
of the coastline yields a relationship between land and sea brightness
temperatures and radiation measurements made at the satellite. Invert
ing this relationship allows separate land and sea brightness temperat
ure values to be derived for each mixed coastal pixel in the original
image, The technique has been successfully applied to 37-GHz verticall
y polarized SSM/I imagery for test areas covering the Gulf of Aden and
the British Isles, Errors in the retrieved brightness temperatures we
re estimated to be of the order of 1-2 K.