2010 STAR Seminars

I will be retiring on the first of January. In this talk, I will give an overview of what I have been doing for the past thirty two years. These include fifteen years with DOD (Navy and Air Force civilian work) and seventeen years here at NOAA. Topics will include retrieval systems, direct readout, image processing, cloud microphysics retrieval, radiative transfer, data assimilation, microwave footprint modeling, and a host of others.

The advent of quasi-global, real-time precipitation analyses based on satellite observations has lead to the reality of running global hydrological models and algorithms for the estimation of the occurrence of floods and rain-induced landslides. These calculations provide information useful to national and international agencies in understanding the intensity, timeline and impact on populations of these significant hazard events. This talk will summarize the techniques and results from an experimental system producing such real-time flood and landslide nowcasts and forecasts at 0.25° latitude/longitude resolution, with results available through the TRMM website (trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov). Published evaluations of the current system are described that indicate useful skill in comparison with global event inventories. These evaluations indicate higher skill for larger rainfall systems (e.g., tropical cyclone landfall vs. flash flood), a reasonable result considering the typical resolution of the rainfall information (0.25° and 3-hr) and the resolution of the current models/algorithms. Examples of recent flood events using an improved, higher resolution global hydrological model will also be shown. And cases using global NWP precipitation forecasts to extend the applicability of the hydrological calculations from 1-5 days will be described. In this approach the model rainfall is adjusted by the satellite observations to provide consistent rainfall amounts into the flood model.

Improvements in this approach over the next few years will include 1) better precipitation analyses utilizing space-time interpolations that maintain accurate intensity distributions, 2) improved rain estimation for shallow, orographic rainfall systems and some types of monsoon rainfall, 3) higher resolution landslide algorithms with combined physical/empirical approaches, 4) higher resolution flood models with accurate routing and regional calibration, and 5) use of satellite soil moisture for more accurate pre-conditions.

At first, a brief introduction is presented for state key laboratory of remote sensing science, which is jointly sponsored by the Institute of Remote Sensing applications of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University. The main parts of the presentation include: (1) Introduction: scientific meanings, research advances have achieved, challenge issues existing; (2) Research advances on radiation transfer modeling on multi-scale remote sensing data: after a general overview of remote sensing radiation transfer modeling, several recent research advances are presented, including leaf spectrum model (dPROSPECT), vegetation canopy BRDF models, directional thermal infrared emission models(TRGM, SLEC), rugged mountains area radiation models, and kernel driven models etc. (3) Research advances on land surface parameters inversion based on multi-source remote sensing data: the developed inversion algorithms are presented for atmospheric aerosol optical depth, solar downward radiation, land surface albedo, temperature/emissivity, albedo, and leaf area index, etc. (4) Afterwards, quantitative remote sensing model for net radiation, heat flux and evapotranspiration are introduced while the assimilation technology to combine the remote sensing data and land surface process model are showed accordingly. (5) Multi-scale field experiment system design and field experiment campaign for model validation and calibration: the ground based, tower based, and airborne multi-angular measurement system are built to measure the directional reflectance, emission and scattering characteristics from visible, near infrared, thermal infrared and microwave bands for model validation and calibration. The remote sensing pixel scale "true value" measurement strategy are designed to gain the ground "true value" of LST, ALBEDO, LAI, soil moisture and ET etc. at 1-km2 for remote sensing product validation. Then, two field campaigns in Gansu, 2008 and in Beijing, 2010 will be introduced briefly. (6) Software system development for land surface energy balance monitoring as a long time series based on multi-source observation data: after the software system requirement analysis, software design and development are introduced, the software system prototype will be demonstrated. Conclusion and discussion are presented at last.

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) will image Earth in 16 spectral channels, including 10 thermal IR (TIR) channels. The instantaneous field of view (IFOV) of each TIR detector element is (56 rad)2. The ABI has an onboard full-aperture blackbody, the Internal Calibration Target (ICT), used in conjunction with deep space looks to calibrate the ABI's TIR channels. The ICT is only observed over a small range of temperatures and at one specific pair of reflection angles from the ABI's two scan mirrors. The sunlit area on Mercury's surface underfills the IFOV's of the ABI's TIR channels, but has a much higher range of characteristic temperatures than the ICT, so its radiation is weighted more strongly toward shorter wavelengths. Comparison of a TIR channel's responses to the ICT and to Mercury provides a sensitive means to evaluate variations in spectral response functions among detector elements, across the ABI's field of regard, and among instruments on different satellites. Observations of Mercury can also verify co-registration among the ABI's atmospheric absorption channels that do not observe features on Earth's surface. Observations of Mercury can also be performed by the Imager and Sounder on the present operational GOES satellites. The optimal conditions for viewing Mercury typically occur during one or two intervals of a few weeks each year when it traverses the ABI's FOR (-10.5o < declination < +10.5°o) with an elongation angle from the Sun of at least 20.5°o.

In recent years, many new methods have been developed to evaluate forecasts that have coherent spatial structures. Several different categories of approaches have been developed, including object- or features-based, scale separation, neighborhood, and field deformation methods. Most of the methods were originally developed with the intention to apply them in the evaluation of quantitative precipitation forecasts. However, the methods have also proven to be useful for other types of fields that have coherent structures (e.g., wind, relative humidity) and have been applied to several types of remotely sensed fields. The new approaches often can provide much more meaningful information about the quality of a field than is possible to attain from use of more traditional grid-to-grid comparison methods.

Over the last several years, the developers of many of the spatial verification methods have been involved in an intercomparison project that was designed to compare the capabilities of the methods and provide information about how various aspects of performance are measured by each approach. The intercomparison was based on the evaluation of the same set of high-resolution spatial forecasts by each method. In addition, the methods were applied to a set of artificial geometric cases with simple, known errors.

This presentation will discuss the motivation for using the new spatial methods to evaluate special fields and will briefly describe the various categories of methods that have been developed. Results of the method intercomparison will be summarized, and guidance on the types of information that can be provided by the different approaches will be provided. Finally, some applications of the methods to non-precipitation fields will be considered...

Stray light in the MOBY spectrographs causes a bias in the radiometric results. Under a NIST-led effort, laser characterization data was acquired at the Snug Harbor facility in the early 2000's and a stray light correction algorithm developed and implemented (Feinholzet al, 2008, J. Atmos. Oceanic Tech.). Starting in 2005, it became obvious the stray light performance of the optical sensors in MOBY was changing with time. In 2008, the systems were fully characterized at the NIST SIRCUS facility. Analysis of these data sets began in FY10 with NOAA. The presentation will outline the progress made in the project tasks which are: analysis of the laser observations, extension to the other channels, validating the matrix results by implementing alternate techniques, testing on 2008 in situ MOBY data and comparing to existing method, validating the method and generating a report. Preliminary results indicate the Lu retrievals with 2008 deployments could be corrected by up to 5% at 412 nm compared to the existing SLC algorithm.

Precipitation is intimately associated with cloud, water vapor, and heat processes, which are governed by cloud, water vapor, and heat budgets, respectively, in precipitation physical space. A set of diagnostic precipitation equations is derived by combining cloud budget with water vapor and heat budget, respectively. These precipitation equations are applied to the quantitative precipitation analysis of cloud-resolving model simulations. Diurnally-perturbed precipitation equations are derived to study the diurnal variation of surface rainfall and to show that the nocturnal rainfall peak is caused by nighttime radiative cooling. The calculations of precipitation statistics reveal that, in the analysis of domain mean data, rainfall with water vapor convergence makes the maximum contribution to rainfall whereas in the analysis of grid-scale data, maximum rainfall contribution is attributable to rainfall with water vapor divergence. The evaluation of a classic convective-stratiform rainfall separation scheme with rain rate shows that this type of scheme cannot properly distinguish between convective and stratiform rainfall. The spatial scale dependence of precipitation efficiency indicates that the statistical error of calculation of precipitation efficiency using large-scale data can be more than 50%. A study of the sensitivity of the precipitation simulation to initial conditions shows that the precipitation simulation is extremely sensitive to the initial temperature and water vapor conditions due to biased calculations of vapor condensation and deposition processes.

Satellite altimeter sea level height data show that in the subtropical Pacific there is a zonal band between 20°N and 25°N, in which nonlinear Rossby eddy trains, consisting of the cyclonic and anticyclonic mesoscale eddies and originating from the tropic Pacific, propagate westward, and finally reach South China Sea (SCS) in the form of wave motion all year round. Thus, the tropic Pacific is a source of the mesoscale turbulence, and the SCS is a sink for eddies. The Luzon Strait (LS) lying between Taiwan Island and Luzon Island, a large gap of the Pacific western boundary, is just facing the zonal band and serves as an interface between the Pacific and SCS. The horizontal length scale of eddies is O(300 km). The field measurements show that the vertical scale of eddies is O(2000 m). The average angular velocity is O(5x10^-6 s^-1) and the average westward propagation speed is O(0.1 ms^-1). Before entering LS, eddies meet the Kuroshio first. The calculation results of this study indicate that the momentum and kinetic energy ratios of Kuroshio with the width of 100 km and the depth of 1000 m, and the velocity of O(1 ms^-1) to eddy with the same horizontal length scale monotonically decrease with the eddy radius. For small eddies with radii smaller than 70 - 100 km, the ratios are greater than 2, implying that the Kuroshio would play a dominant role when they collide or interact with each other. Thus, for small eddies, the Kuroshio might serve as a dynamic shield to block eddies' westward propagation. For large eddies with radii greater than 200 km, the ratios are smaller than 0.3, implying that eddies would play a dominant role when they collide or interact with the Kuroshio. Thus, for large eddies, the Kuroshio is relatively weak compared to eddies, it is unable to keep itself unchanged under the forcing by a large eddy or multiple eddies. In contrast, the Kuroshio mainstream path would be modified by eddies, including cutting off, meandering, and bifurcating sometimes. As a result, the Kuroshio behaves as an unsteady flow in the study area. A case study of an anticyclonic mesoscale eddy passing through LS in June-July 2004 gives a complete description of Kuroshio bifurcation process. The eddy penetrates through LS and enters into SCS simultaneously with Kuroshio bifurcation. The bifurcated westward branch forms Kuroshio Loop Current (KLC) in the northeast SCS deep basin. The dynamic analysis indicates that the behavior of eddies entering SCS can be described by the solution to the quasi-geostrophic vorticity equation. An eddy may gain the vorticity from KLC through the eddy-current coupling. While the eddy would be decaying with a time scale of ^O(3 d) due to the side friction dissipation after being of independence of KLC.

The Algorithm Development Library is a new tool designed to reduce the time and effort required to implement science algorithms into operational environments. The Phase 1 development effort has just completed, providing a capability that will be used by NPP algorithm developers, the NPP Cal/Val team, and others to update and improve science algorithms for operational use in the IDPS. Phase 1 was a proof-of-concept, demonstrating significant savings in the science-to-operational conversion process. This briefing will discuss the ADL concept, its use, and the results of the Phase 1 study, and provide an overview of the Phase 2 activities and schedule.

This seminar will serve as an introduction for Carl Nim, who is a 2010 Knauss Fellow in the Coral Reef Watch office of STAR. The seminar will provide an overview of his background and experience using remote sensing in coastal locations and discuss its applications to environmental issues in these areas. Carl will also explain how his position fits in amongst the broader role of communicating between scientists and managers in order to develop products, which aid in fulfilling the goals and objectives of NOAA. Using examples from the recent Coral Reef Watch workshop, Carl will illustrate how current requests for remote sensing products by managers can be derived from STAR products to achieve the goals and objectives of STAR and CRCP.

Malaria is the major vector-born disease in the world. It occurs in 107 countries with half the world's population. Every year 300-500 million clinical cases of malaria occur with 1.5-3 million fatalities. Children, old people and pregnant women are the most vulnerable to malaria. Africa is the most affected continent, which contributes 60% of global malaria cases and 80% of deaths. Malaria is strongly affected by the environment. Climate and ecosystems determines distribution of malaria and weather affects timing, duration, area and intensity of outbreaks. In general warm and wet weather stimulated mosquitoes hatching, activity and the rate of malaria transmission to people. Satellite data have been used in recent years to monitor malaria based on Vegetation Health (VH), method that have been developed applied successfully for early detect and monitor malaria from the operational environmental satellite. The VH was developed from reflectance/emission measured by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) flown on NOAA polar-orbiting satellites since 1981. The calibrated measurements were converted to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and brightness temperature (BT), which were expressed as a deviation from 30-year climatology. Three indices characterizing moisture (VCI), thermal (TCI) and vegetation health (VHI) conditions were produced and calibrated against in situ data. They were applied to identify malaria early enough to mitigate its consequences. These results covering several countries in Africa, Asia and South America will be presented.

Soil moisture plays a vital role in the partitioning of sensible and latent heat fluxes in the surface energy budget and the lack of a dense spatial and temporal network of ground-based observations provides a challenge to the initialization of the "true" soil moisture state in numerical weather prediction simulations. The retrieval of soil moisture using observations from both satellite-based thermal-infrared (TIR) and passive microwave (PM) sensors has been developed (Anderson et al., 2007; Hain et al., 2009; Jackson, 1993; Njoku et al., 2003). The ability of the TIR and microwave observations to diagnose soil moisture conditions within different layers of the soil profile provides an opportunity to use each in a synergistic data assimilation approach towards the goal of diagnosing the "true" soil moisture state from surface to root-zone. TIR and PM retrievals of soil moisture are compared to soil moisture estimates provided by a retrospective Land Information System (LIS) simulation using the NOAH LSM during the time period of 2003 - 2008. The TIR-based soil moisture product is provided by a retrieval of soil moisture associated with surface flux estimates from the Atmosphere-Land- Exchange-Inversion (ALEXI) model (Anderson et al., 1997; Mecikalski et al., 1999; Hain et al., 2009). The PM soil moisture retrieval is provided by the Vrijie Universiteit Amsterdam(VUA)- NASA surface soil moisture product. The VUA retrieval is based on the findings of Owe et al. (2001; 2008) using the Land Surface Parameter model (LPRM), which uses one dual polarized channel (6.925 or 10.65 GHz) for a dual-retrieval of surface soil moisture and vegetation water content. In addition, retrievals of ALEXI (TIR) and AMSR-E (PM) soil moisture are assimilated with the LIS and the NOAH LSM. A series of data assimilation experiments are completed with the following configuration, (a) no assimilation, (b) only ALEXI soil moisture, (c) only AMSR-E soil moisture, and (d) ALEXI and AMSR-E soil moisture. The relative skill of each assimilation configuration is quantified through a data-denial experimental design, where the LSM is forced with an inferior precipitation dataset (in this case, the TRMM 3B42RT precipitation dataset). The ability of each assimilation configuration to correct for precipitation errors is quantified through the comparison of the results with a single simulation over the same domain with a highquality (NLDAS) precipitation dataset. Finally, applications of ALEXI surface flux estimates with respect to the detection and monitoring of drought across North America will also be presented.

Theoretical rapid intensification (RI) mechanisms are diagnosed for high-resolution, 1.33 km Advanced Hurricane WRF (AHW) simulations of three Atlantic hurricanes known to have historically undergone rapid strengthening: Katrina (2005), Gordon (2006) and Felix (2007). A simulated 27 h period detailing the times of RI for each tropical cyclone was evaluated against the NHC Best Track dataset. The verified model output was put into the context of key features thought to be associated with RI. Following the arguments of Black et al. (2002) and Braun et al. (2006), these features are discussed for each hurricane. Five subsequent fields are analyzed: low-level winds, 850 hPa positive vorticity, precipitable water, 0-6 km storm-relative helicity and most-unstable convective available potential energy. The fields piece together a comprehensive model that diagnoses the effect moderate to strong shear has on numerically simulated RI by linking convective and rotational features within the eyewall. Conclusions are drawn on the how well the AHW resolves overall intensity change and the ensuing inner core dynamics. Forecasting potential of this evaluation method is discussed.

The authors investigate the relationship between Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in the tropical Indian Ocean (TIO) and the seasonal atmosphere circulation in the Asian Monsoon Region (AMR) using the Maximum Covariance Analyses (MCA). The results show that the Asian monsoon circulation is significantly correlated with two dominant SST anomaly (SSTA) modes: the Indian Ocean Basin Mode (IOB) and the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode (IOD). The peak SSTA of the IOB appears in spring and has a much stronger relationship with the Asian summer monsoon than the peak of the IOD does, while the peak SSTA for the IOD appears in fall and shows a stronger link to the Asian winter monsoon than to the Asian summer monsoon. In addition, the IOB in spring has relatively stronger link with the atmospheric circulation in summer than in other seasons. The large-scale atmospheric circulation and SSTA patterns of the covariability of the first two dominant MCA modes are described. For the first MCA mode, a warm IOB persists from spring to summer, and the atmospheric circulation is enhanced by the establishment of the climatological summer monsoon. The increased evaporative moisture associated with the warm IOB is transported to South Asia by climatological summer monsoon, which increases the moisture convergence towards this region, leading to a significant increase in the summer monsoon precipitation. For the second MCA mode, a positive IOD possibly corresponds to weaker Indian winter monsoon and more precipitation over the southwestern and eastern equatorial TIO.

The Small Business Innovation Research Program for FY 2010 is a NOAA Program for which a solicitation just opened on October 14, 2009 and closed on January 14, 2010. Program objectives include stimulating technological innovation in the private sector and strengthening the role of small business in meeting Federal research and development (R&D) needs. The SBIR Reauthorization Act of 2000 requires the DOC to establish a three-phase SBIR program by reserving a percentage of its extramural R&D budget to be awarded to small business concerns for innovation research. There are three SBIR phases: Phase I is the for Feasibility Research and the purpose is to determine the technical feasibility of the proposed research and the quality of performance of the small business concern receiving an award. Phase II is for Research and Development prototype development in which only firms that are awarded Phase I contracts under this solicitation will be given the opportunity to submit a Phase II proposal. Phase III is intended for commercialization and it's intended that non-SBIR capital be used by the small business to pursue commercial applications of Phase II. Consultative arrangements between firms and universities or other non-profit organizations are encouraged, with the small business serving as the prime contractor. Contact with NOAA. In the interest of competitive fairness, oral or written communication with NOAA or any of its components concerning additional information on the technical topics described in Section 8 of this solicitation is prohibited. Requests for general information on the NOAA SBIR program may be addressed to:
Kelly K. Wright
NOAA SBIR Program Manager
1335 East West Highway, SSMC1, Suite 106
Silver Spring MD 20910-3284
Telephone: 301-713-3565
Fax: 301-713-4100
E-mail: kelly.wright@noaa.gov