Development & Implementation of the Best Means of Correcting Vaisala Radiosonde Humidity & Temperature Measuremwnts
The first of two main goals of this project has been to develop and implement a correction procedure that maximizes the accuracy of relative humidity (RH) measurements from ARM (Vaisala) radiosondes, and to evaluate the correction algorithm using a dataset of simultaneous measurements from Vaisala radiosones and the reference-quality NOAA/CMDL cryogenic hygrometer. The second main goal has been to determine how comparison of radiosonde RH measurements to reference-quality RH measurements obtained routinely in the ventilated ''mailbox'' at the SGP launch site can be used to characterize and improve the accuracy of ARM radiosonde measurements. This project is important to a broad variety of ARM research areas, including initializing numerical models and evaluating model results, improving the accuracy of radiative transfer calculations and parameterizations, evaluating water vapor retrievals from ground-based or satellite instruments, and developing water vapor and cloud parameterizations. Tobin et al. (2003) showed that in order to achieve a target accuracy of 1 W/m2 in the downwelling and outgoing longwave flux, the water vapor profile must be known with an absolute accuracy of 2% in the total-column integrated water vapor, and 10% in the upper troposphere (UT).
- Research Organization:
- National Center for Atmospheric Research
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- FG03-02ER63317
- OSTI ID:
- 838779
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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