Striping Noise Analysis and Mitigation for Microwave Temperature Sounder-2 Observations

The Microwave Temperature Sounder (MWTS)-2 has a total of 13 temperature-sounding channels with the capability of observing radiance emissions from near the surface to the stratosphere. Similar to the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), striping pattern noise, primarily in the cross-track direction, exists in MWTS-2 radiance observations. In this study, an algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) combined with ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is described and applied to MWTS-2 brightness temperature observations. It is arguably necessary to smooth the first three principal component (PC) coefficients by removing the first four intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using the EEMD method (denoted as PC3/IMF4). After the PC3/IMF4 noise mitigation, the striping pattern noise is effectively removed from the brightness temperature observations. The noise level in MWTS-2 observations is significantly higher than that detected in ATMS observations. In May 2014, the scanning profile of MWTS-2 was adjusted from varying-speed scanning to constantspeed scanning. The impact on striping noise levels brought on by this scan profile change is also analyzed here. The striping noise in brightness temperature observations worsened after the profile change. Regardless of the scan profile change, the striping noise mitigation method reported in this study can more or less suppress the noise levels in MWTS-2 observations.