A Comprehensive Analysis of AIRS Near Surface Air Temperature and Water Vapor Over Land and Tropical Ocean

Abstract:

Version 6 (V6) of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder’s (AIRS) combined infrared and microwave (IR+MW) retrieval of near surface air temperature (NSAT) and water vapor (NSWV) is validated over the United States with the densely populated MESONET data. MESONET data is a collection of surface/near surface meteorological data from many federal and state agencies. The ones used for this analysis are measured from instruments maintained by the National Weather Service (NWS), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Interagency Remote Automatic Weather Stations (RAWS), resulting in a little more than four thousand locations throughout the US. Over the Tropical oceans, NSAT and NSWV are compared to a network of moored buoys from the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean/Triangle Trans-Ocean Buoy Network (TAO/TRITON), and the Pilot Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA). With the analysis of AIRS surface and near surface products over ocean, we glean information on how retrieval of NSAT and NSWV over land can be improved and why it needs some adjustments. We also compare AIRS initial guess of near surface products that are trained on fifty days of ECMWF along with AIRS calibrated radiances, to ECMWF analysis data. The comparison is done to show the differing characteristics of AIRS initial guesses from ECMWF.