The Megha-Tropiques mission: a review after three years in orbit

Humidity profile retrieval from SAPHIR on-board the Megha-Tropiques

The Megha-Tropiques (MT) satellite, a joint IndoFrench mission, was launched by ISRO’s PSLV-C18 on 12 October 2011 from Sriharikota, India. SAPHIR, a microwave humidity sounder on-board Megha Tropiques operates in six channels with frequencies around 183.31 GHz. A radiative transfer simulationbased operational algorithm has been developed to retrieve layer-averaged relative-humidity (LARH) for ...

On the possibility of retrieving near-surface rain rate from the microwave sounder SAPHIR of the Megha-Tropiques mission

In this study, ab initio atmospheric profiles generated through high-resolution calculations from the community weather model WRF, suitably matched up with both TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) instruments of the TRMM satellite were used to compute simulated brightness temperatures (BTs) corresponding to SAPHIR frequencies, through an in-house polarized radiative transfe...

Relative humidity profiling with Megha-tropiques

Rainfall estimation using spaceborne microwave radar and radiometric measurements

The present paper deals with some of the recent remote sensing techniques for the estimation of rainfall, mainly from passive and active microwave measurements from space. The sensitivity analysis based on forward approach following the radiative transfer modelling using data from ECMWF and mesoscale models is presented. The inverse methods of retrieving rainfall from satellite microwave measur...

A layer-averaged relative humidity profile retrieval for microwave observations: design and results for the Megha-Tropiques payload

A statistical method trained and optimized to retrieve seven-layer relative humidity (RH) profiles is presented and evaluated with measurements from radiosondes. The method makes use of the microwave payload of the Megha-Tropiques platform, namely the SAPHIR sounder and the MADRAS imager. The approach, based on a generalized additive model (GAM), embeds both the physical and statistical charact...