Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Water Vapor

It conically scans and keeps an angle of incidence on the earth surface (a nominal of 55 degrees) and accomplishes a swath width of about 1450 km. The AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for regular observations, and the AMSR-E restarted its observation in slow rotation mode (2 rotations per minute) on December 4, 2012. However, the AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for slow rotation mode and it automatically halted its observation and rotation on December 4, 2015.

Level 2 product stores the Geophysical quantity from the brightness temperature of level 1 product. This product includes Water Vapor (WV). PWI (water vapor index) is converted to total water vapor content (PWA, kg/m^2) using a look-up table, which is designed as the provability of PWA with AMSR retrievals is equivalent to that of PWA with radio sonde.

If PWI is out of range of look-up table, the flag 'low accuracy' is added. The physical quantity unit is kg/m^2. Also, the quality flag for each observation point (Pixel Data Quality) is stored.

The provided format is HDF4. Spatial resolution is 10 km. The current version of the product is "Version 7".

The generation unit is scene (defined as a half orbit).