Five years of AMSR-E monitoring and successive GCOM-W1/AMSR2 instrument

摘要

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been proposing the Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM). GCOM will consist of two series of medium size satellites: GCOM-W (Water) and GCOM-C (Climate). The mission will take over the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-II (ADEOS-II or Midori-II). The GCOM-W1 satellite (the first generation of GCOM-W series) was approved by the Space Activities Commission of Japan to proceed to the development phase. Current target of launch date is the beginning of 2012. The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) is sole mission instrument onboard the GCOM-W 1 satellite. Although the simultaneous observation by a microwave scatterometer and AMSR2 is still desired, installation of the scatterometer is not the case at least for the GCOM-W1 satellite. AMSR2 is a successor of the AMSR for the EOS (AMSR-E) provided to the NASA Aqua satellite and AMSR onboard Midori-II with some improvements based on the experiences of AMSR and AMSR-E. They include an improvement of calibration system and an addition of 7.3 GHz channels to help mitigating radio-frequency interference issue. The AMSR-E instrument is still providing continuous data records more than 5-years. Observed brightness temperatures and retrieved geophysical parameters are being widely used for monitoring environmental changes and for applying to the operational applications such as numerical weather forecasting. We expect a long-term continuity by leading the GCOM-W/AMSR2 to the AMSR-E observation.