Aqua/AMSR-E L2 Snow Water Equivalent

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 Snow Water Equivalent (SND). Compared with non-snow surfaces, therefore, a snowpack has a distinctive electromagnetic signature at frequencies above 25 GHz.

When viewed using passive microwave radiometers from above the snowpack, the scattering of upwelling radiation depresses the brightness temperature of the snow at increasingly high frequencies. This scattering behavior of snow can be exploited to detect the presence of snow on the ground. Having detected the snow, it is then possible to estimate the snow depth of the pack using the degree of scattering.

The physical quantity unit is cm. 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).