Measurements made off the west coast of Africa in 2006 as part of the AMMA (African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses) program.

Measurements made off the western African coast in 1997.

Measurements made near South Africa in 2001.

Measurements made in the monsoonal Arabian Sea in 2011.

Measurements made off the Namibian and South African coasts between 2000 and 2002.

Measurements made in the monsoonal Arabian Sea in 2009 to validate the Indian Satellite, OceanSat-2.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Atmosphere Group develops remote-sensing algorithms for deriving sets of atmospheric parameters from MODIS radiance data. These parameters can be integrated into conceptual and predictive global models. MODIS Atmosphere Products Subset Statistics (MAPSS) are generated over important locations around the world, as one of the ways to increase the scope of application of the MODIS atmospheric parameters. This MAPSS data set contains daily time series of the MODIS MOD05_L2 water vapor product over seventeen (17) AERONET sunphotometer measurement sites in southern Africa for the period February 24, 2000, through March 4, 2002. The process of generating the statistics involves identifying these locations on the MODIS MOD05_L2 product, extracting the values of the pixel corresponding to each coordinate point as well as surrounding pixels falling within a 50 x 50 km box centered on the coordinate point. The data product consists of column water-vapor amounts. During the daytime, a near-infrared algorithm is applied over clear land areas of the globe and above clouds over both land and ocean. Over clear ocean areas, water-vapor estimates are provided over the extended glint area. An infrared algorithm for deriving atmospheric profiles is also applied both day and night for Level 2. The data files are stored as ASCII tables in comma-separated-value (.csv) format. There is one file per site per year for each of the following two variables: total column precipitable water vapor (infrared retrieved) and total column precipitable water vapor (near-infrared retrieved).

The Microwave InfraRed Algorithm (MIRA) is used to produce an imagery data set of daily mean rain rates at 0.1 degree spatial resolution over southern Africa for the period 1993-2001. MIRA combines passive microwave (PMW) from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) on board the DMSP F10 and F14 satellites at a resolution of 0.5 degrees and infrared (IR) data from the Meteosat 4, 5, 6, and 7 satellites in 2-hour slots at a resolution of 5 km. This approach accounts for the limitations of both data types in estimating precipitation. Rainfall estimates are produced at the high spatial and temporal frequency of the IR data using rainfall information from the PMW data. An IR/rain rate relationship, variable in space and time, is derived from coincident observations of IR and PMW rain rate (accumulated over a calibration domain) using the probability matching method. The IR/rain rate relationship is then applied to IR imagery at full temporal resolution. The results presented here are the daily means of those derived rain rates at 0.1 degree spatial resolution.The rainfall data sets are flat binary images with no headers. They are compressed band sequential (bsq) files that contain all of the daily images for the given year. Each image is an array of 341 lines, each with 401 binary floating-point numbers, containing rainfall at 0.1 degree resolution for the area 10 to 50 degrees longitude and 0 to -34 degrees latitude. The number of band sequential images in each annual file and the associated dates can be found in the file MIRA_data_dates.csv.

Measurements taken in the Aegean and Black seas during 1997 onboard the R/V Akwanavt.

Measurements taken in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean in 1996.