The SPARC water vapour assessment II: biases and drifts of water vapour satellite data records with respect to frost point hygrometer records
Journal article, 2023
Satellite data records of stratospheric water vapour have been compared to balloon-borne frost point hygrometer (FP) profiles that are coincident in space and time. The satellite data records of 15 different instruments cover water vapour data available from January 2000 through December 2016. The hygrometer data are from 27 stations all over the world in the same period. For the comparison, real or constructed averaging kernels have been applied to the hygrometer profiles to adjust them to the measurement characteristics of the satellite instruments. For bias evaluation, we have compared satellite profiles averaged over the available temporal coverage to the means of coincident FP profiles for individual stations. For drift determinations, we analysed time series of relative differences between spatiotemporally coincident satellite and hygrometer profiles at individual stations. In a synopsis we have also calculated the mean biases and drifts (and their respective uncertainties) for each satellite record over all applicable hygrometer stations in three altitude ranges (10-30 hPa, 30-100 hPa, and 100 hPa to tropopause). Most of the satellite data have biases <10 % and average drifts <1 % yr-1 in at least one of the respective altitude ranges. Virtually all biases are significant in the sense that their uncertainty range in terms of twice the standard error of the mean does not include zero. Statistically significant drifts (95 % confidence) are detected for 35 % of the ≈ 1200 time series of relative differences between satellites and hygrometers.
Author
M. Kiefer
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
D. Hurst
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
University of Colorado at Boulder
G. P. Stiller
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Stefan Lossow
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Holger Vömel
National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Anderson
Hampton University
F. Azam
Universität Bremen
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Jean Loup Bertaux
Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC)
Laurent Blanot
ACRI-ST
K. Bramstedt
Universität Bremen
J. Burrows
Universität Bremen
R. Damadeo
NASA Langley Research Center
B. M. Dinelli
Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Bologna
Patrick Eriksson
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Geoscience and Remote Sensing
M. Garcia-Comas
Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA)
John C. Gille
University of Colorado at Boulder
National Center for Atmospheric Research
M.E. Hervig
GATS, Inc.
Y. Kasai
Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
F. Khosrawi
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Donal Murtagh
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Geoscience and Remote Sensing
G.E. Nedoluha
Naval Research Laboratory
S. Noël
Universität Bremen
P. Raspollini
Consiglo Nazionale Delle Richerche
W.G. Read
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Karen H. Rosenlof
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Alexei Rozanov
Universität Bremen
C. E. Sioris
York University, Centre For Research in Earth and Space Science
Takafumi Sugita
National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan
T. von Clarmann
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
K.A. Walker
University of Toronto
K. Weigel
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Universität Bremen
Atmospheric Measurement Techniques
1867-1381 (ISSN) 1867-8548 (eISSN)
Vol. 16 19 4589-4642Subject Categories
Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences
DOI
10.5194/amt-16-4589-2023