Cryosphere products in the first generation of the Global Change Observation Mission-Climate (GCOM-C1)

M. Hori, Te Aoki, K. Stamnes, A. Kokhanovsky

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The "Global Change Observation Mission-Climate" (GCOM-C) is a project of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for the global and long-term observation of the Earth environment. The GCOM-C is expected to play an important role in monitoring and understanding global climate change. It will be a kind of health checkup of the Earth from space. The GCOM-C also aims to construct, use, and verify systems that enable continuous global-scale observations of various geophysical parameters. The GCOMC is a part of the JAXA's GCOM mission which consists of two satellite series, GCOM-C and GCOM-W (Water), spanning three generations in order to perform uniform and stable global observations for 13 years. Whereas GCOM-W carries a multi-frequency, dual-polarized, passive microwave radiometer named Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) to observe waterrelated targets such as precipitation, water vapor, sea surface wind speed, sea surface temperature, soil moisture, and snow depth, GCOM-C carries a multi-spectral optical radiometer named Second Generation Global Imager (SGLI), which will have special features of wide spectral coverage from 380nm to 12μm, a high spatial resolution of 250m, a field of view exceeding 1000km, twodirection simultaneous observation, and polarization observation. The GCOM-C mission aims to contribute to improving our knowledge and prediction of the global carbon cycle and radiation budget through high-accuracy observation of global vegetation, ocean color, temperature, cloud, aerosol, and snow and ice through the SGLI observations. The GCOM will take over the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-II (ADEOS-II) mission and transition into long-term monitoring of the Earth. One of the important targets to be observed by GCOM-C is snow and sea ice in the cryosphere. SGLI on GCOM-C1 will retrieve not only snow cover extent but also snow physical parameters such as snow grain size, temperature, and mass fraction of impurity mixed in snow layer. The snow physical parameters are important factors that determine spectral albedo of the snow surface. Thus it is essential to monitor those parameters from space in order to better understand snow metamorphosis and melting process and also to study the response of snow and sea-ice cover extent in the Polar Regions to a climate forcing such as global warming. A final goal of these observations is to improve land-surface processes in numerical climate models by accumulating knowledge on the evolution of snow and sea ice in the cryosphere.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)26-29
Number of pages4
JournalInternational Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives
Volume38
StatePublished - 2010
EventISPRS Technical Commission VIII Symposium on Networking the World with Remote Sensing - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: 9 Aug 201012 Aug 2010

Keywords

  • Climate
  • Remote sensing
  • Snow cover
  • Snow grain size
  • Snow impurity
  • Surface temperature

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