A Tool to Estimate Land Surface Emissivities at Microwave frequencies (TELSEM) has been developed. Its objective is to provide a good estimate of the microwave land surface emissivity to improve the retrieval of atmospheric profiles or the direct assimilation of radiances in numerical weather prediction (NWP) models using microwave sounder data over land. TELSEM provides emissivity estimates and error-covariance matrices for all land surfaces between 19 and 100 GHz and for all angles and linear polarizations. It is based on a pre-calculated monthly-mean emissivity climatology derived from Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) observations. Results show that when TELSEM is used, radiative-transfer simulations are closer to real observations. Experiments show that TELSEM can be applied to provide a first guess for the surface emissivity down to 6 GHz and up to 190 GHz .

The documentation, the code and the related data set are available upon request to catherine.prigent@obspm.fr.

When using the code and/or data set, the data providers should be acknowledged. Reference is:
Aires, F., C. Prigent, F. Bernardo, C. Jimenez, R. Saunders, and P. Brunel, A Tool to Estimate Land-Surface Emissivities at Microwave frequencies (TELSEM) for use in numerical weather prediction, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 137:690-699, 2011.