[26-Feb-2014] Santos-Garcia, A., Aslebagh, S., Jacob, M.M., and Jones, W.L.
Presented at the 2014 Ocean Sciences MeetingThis paper presents results of the Aquarius Cal/Val effort to improve the Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) measurements during and/or after significant rainfall events. In this regard, we have developed the AQ Rain Accumulation (RA) Product, which provides a time-history of rainfall averaged over an AQ IFOV. This RA product is derived from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 near-global rain product, which is is collocated with Aquarius L-2 science data and time interpolated to provides rainfall history for each AQ IFOV during the previous 24 hrs to AQ observation time. The purpose of this paper is to describe the RA product and to present validation results using independent environmental data records (EDR) WindSat rain retrievals. The WindSat EDR's have a high percentage of collocation (within ±45 min) of the AQ observations.