Satellite Measurement of Upper Tropospheric Water Vapor: Development and Applications and Applications for the ARM Program

摘要

Upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) measurements from the 6.7 micron channel on GOES (8, 9, 12) and GMS-5 satellites were employed to develop a near real-time UTH product that is now available from the ARM External Data Center (XDC). The UTH product is available in either gridded format (2.0 x 2.0 lat-lon resolution), full-disk pixel resolution, or individual pixel resolution for both the SGP and TWP sites. This product provides the basis for the instrument intercomparison and validation activities (Section 0.2), diurnal analysis and model evaluation (0.3), and cloud lifecycle studies (0.5); and is also an important component of the research proposed here. Full details regarding the retrieval algorithm for the ARM sites can be found in Soden et al. (2004a) and references therein.