The Comparison of AMSR-E Brightness Temperature with Ground-based Observation on the North Slope

Advanced microwave scanning radiometer - EOS (AMSR-E) brightness temperature observations of the North Slope, Alaska are synthesized using an improved Backus-Gilbert algorithm and compared to the standard brightness temperature product for AMSR-E. This algorithm improves the spatial resolution for the 6 GHz and 10 GHz channels by taking advantage of the oversampling of these two frequencies, which allows a tradeoff between noise and spatial resolution. Nearly circular synthesized footprints for all channels are achieved by using a circular Gaussian reference footprint. Our synthetic observations differed from the standard AMSR-E products at 19 and 37 GHz where the scales of surface heterogeneities become important. The synthesized AMSR-E observations are compared with ground-based data collected during the Tenth Radiobrightness Energy Balance Experiment (REBEX10) conducted from May to June of 2004 near Toolik Lake on the North Slope. Plot-scale and satellite resolution scale observations differed at both 6 and 19 GHz caused by sensitivity to scale- dependent hydrologic processes.