Improvements to NPOESS temperature and moisture sounding by combining sounder and imaging instrument data

摘要

The CrIS and ATMS instruments on NPOESS will provide high quality temperature and moisture profiles greatly surpassing the capabilities of current operational satellite sounders. However, performance of these systems continues to be a challenge in cloudy scenes. The VIIRS sensor on NPOESS will provide much higher spatial resolution data than that of CrIS, with some overlap in spectral coverage. This sub-pixel information can be used to enhance the retrieval performance in a number of ways. This paper presents a potential technique to improve performance of the CrIS temperature profile retrievals by incorporating data from VIIRS. Improvements include more accurate retrievals in partly cloudy situations, better effective spatial resolution and more robust quality control diagnostics. We provide an overview of our approach and show examples utilizing data from the EOS-Aqua AIRS, AMSU and MODIS sensors.