Correcting the MSU middle tropospheric temperature for diurnal drifts

Carl A. Mears, Matthias C. Schabel, Frank J. Wentz, Benjamin D. Santer, Bala Govindasamy

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Channel 2 of the 9 Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) flown on NOAA polar orbiting platforms provides a 23-year time series of middle-tropospheric temperature. These measurements may be of sufficient quality for climate studies if intersatellite calibration offsets and drifts can be accurately characterized and removed. One of the most important and difficult to characterize sources of long-term drift in the data is due to the evolution of the local observing time due to slow changes in the orbital parameters of each NOAA platform, which can alias diurnal temperature changes into the long-term time series. To account for this effect, we have constructed monthly diurnal climatologies of MSU Channel 2 brightness temperature using the hourly output of a general circulation model as input for a microwave radiative transfer model. We report the results of this calculation, and validate the result by comparing with MSU observations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages1839-1841
Number of pages3
StatePublished - 2002
Externally publishedYes
Event2002 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2002) - Toronto, Ont., Canada
Duration: Jun 24 2002Jun 28 2002

Other

Other2002 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2002)
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto, Ont.
Period6/24/026/28/02

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • General Earth and Planetary Sciences

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