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Validating the microwave sounding unit stratospheric record using GPS occultation
Author(s) -
Schrøder Thomas,
Leroy Stephen,
Stendel Martin,
Kaas Eigil
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2003gl017588
Subject(s) - radio occultation , occultation , global positioning system , depth sounding , environmental science , troposphere , calibration , remote sensing , meteorology , atmospheric sounding , geodesy , geology , geography , physics , computer science , telecommunications , oceanography , quantum mechanics , astronomy
We validate the temperature climatology recorded by the Microwave Sounding Unit with GPS occultation data collected by the GPS/MET experiment. We choose to validate only the lower stratospheric MSU climatology in order to circumvent the wet‐dry ambiguity associated with GPS occultation in the mid‐ to lower troposphere. We simulate the lower stratospheric channel's brightness temperature by convolving each GPS/MET temperature profile with a vertical weighting function and then map the irregularly gridded data using a Bayesian interpolation scheme. In northern polar night, the MSU T ls deviates from GPS occultation by as much as 10 K while occultation is consistent with the NCEP Reanalysis used for diagnostic purposes. NCEP and GPS occultation deviate by 1 K in the tropics, consistent with a warm bias in NCEP Reanalysis. GPS occultation renders the problems MSU encounters with inter‐satellite calibration obsolete, because calibration by atomic clocks is free of systematic error and can completely cover the diurnal cycle.