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Description
The AMSR-E Level-2A product (AE_L2A) contains brightness temperatures available at a variety of resolutions that correspond to the footprint sizes of the observations. Each swath is packaged with associated geolocation fields.
Version Description
Changes to this algorithm include:
Complete recalibration to RSS Version 7 standard, as follows:
Intercalibration with other microwave radiometers, particularly SSM/I F13 and WindSat
Calibration with improved Radiative Transfer Model (RTM): RSS RTM Version 2011
Adjustment of the water vapor and oxygen absorptions, particularly the water vapor continuum absorption
Improved calibration over land, based on heavily vegetated tropical rainforest scenes
Nonlinearity correction at 18.7 GHz, brightness temperatures approx. 2 degrees K lower over land
Adjustment to Antenna Pattern Coefficients (APC) for cross-polarization and spillover
Slight shift to the 18.7 GHz center observation frequency
Adjustment of effective hot-load temperature
Improved Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) flagging in response to new geostationary sources. For more details, see the Remote Sensing Systems RFI page:
Replacement of the Geostationary_Satellite_Glint_Angle field with two new fields:
Geostationary_Reflection_Latitude
Geostationary_Reflection_Longitude
For each observation, L2A now includes the location where the reflection vector intersects the geostationary sphere
Citation is critically important for dataset documentation and discovery. This dataset is openly shared, without restriction, in accordance with the EOSDIS Data Use and Citation Guidance.
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Ashcroft, P., & Wentz, F. (2013). AMSR-E/Aqua L2A Global Swath Spatially-Resampled Brightness Temperatures, Version 3 [Data set]. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/AMSR-E/AE_L2A.003 Date Accessed: 2026-06-03
Ashcroft, Peter, and Frank Wentz. “AMSR-E/Aqua L2A Global Swath Spatially-Resampled Brightness Temperatures, Version 3.” NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center, 2013. doi:10.5067/AMSR-E/AE_L2A.003. Date Accessed: 2026-06-03
Ashcroft, Peter, and Frank Wentz. AMSR-E/Aqua L2A Global Swath Spatially-Resampled Brightness Temperatures, Version 3. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center, 2013, doi:10.5067/AMSR-E/AE_L2A.003. Date Accessed: 2026-06-03
Embury, Owen, Merchant, Christopher J., Good, Simon A., Rayner, Nick A., Hyer, Jacob L., Atkinson, Chris, Block, Thomas, Alerskans, Emy, Pearson, Kevin J., Worsfold, Mark, McCarroll, Niall, Donlon, Craig
Schroeder, Ronny, Jacobs, Jennifer M., Cho, Eunsang, Olheiser, Carrie M., DeWeese, Michael M., Connelly, Brian A., Cosh, Michael H., Jia, Xinhua, Vuyovich, Carrie M., Tuttle, Samuel E.