Accurate estimation of measurement noise in remote sensing instruments is critically important for the retrieval
of geophysical quantities and the analysis of bias and trends. It is difficult to estimate noise directly from
observed scene data because it is a combination of many sources, including instrument quiescent noise, scene
inhomogeneity and random background fluctuations. Multiple datasets can be used to separate the instrument
and scene noise.
A noise estimate based on staring at cold space or a calibration source constitutes a lower limit, while noise
estimates derived from the difference between scene observations and a model (such as forecast) convolves the
true noise with the model uncertainty. Ideally, noise should be estimated directly from the observation of the
scene.
We have developed a Bayesian hierarchical model to jointly estimate the scene noise, instrument noise and
instrument biases from sets of overlapping footprints. Informative prior distributions are constructed from pre-launch
test results and inference is done by using Gibbs sampling to sample from the posterior distribution of
the instrument parameters. We demonstrate this model by estimating and comparing the relative noise and
bias of the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) instrument on board the Aqua platform to the Tropospheric
Emission Spectrometer (TES) aboard the Aura platform over the tropical latitudes using the Real-time, global,
sea surface temperature (RTG-SST) analysis as a ground truth.
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