Retrieval of sea surface humidity and back radiation from satellite data

The paper presents a procedure and a software package to compute the sea surface humidity and atmospheric back radiation over the sea from satellite data. These parameters play an important role in air-sea exchange of heat, which in turn, determines the climate. Presently, there are no satellite sensors designed to retrieve them directly by remote sensing. This requires us to depend onin situ data, which are relatively sparse. We present a procedure in this paper that uses emission characteristics of sea surface in the microwave region of electro-magnetic spectrum to retrieve these parameters. A suite of computer programs developed for the purpose are also presented in the paper with their complete source code. The procedure is based on an algorithm originally proposed by Schlussel in 1995. We have presented results for surface humidity and back radiation over the Arabian sea for the year 2000 and have shown them to be in agreement with the atmospheric and oceanographic processes operating during the corresponding seasons.