Evaluation of the oceanic cloud-top height diagnostic product; Part II: Comparison with the NESDIS cloud-top pressure product

The FAA Aviation Weather Research Program’s (AWRP) Oceanic Weather Product Development Team (OW PDT) has developed a cloud-top height diagnostic (CTOP) that is intended to provide information to in-route pilots for identification of hazardous situations. Verification of CTOP is being done to support the formal transition of the product to operations via the Aviation Weather Technology Transfer (AWTT) process. The companion paper (Part I: Strategy of the Verification Methodology) to this one describes the challenges of verifying CTOP in a predominantly data-sparse domain and indicates the utility of the NESDIS cloud-top pressure product (CTP) for data comparison.

This paper details the comparison of the two products. Discussion of the independence of the CTOP and CTP algorithms is presented. The CTP algorithm is based on the CO2 absorption technique utilizing data from GOES sounder IR channels while the CTOP algorithm is based on the IR window technique utilizing data from the GOES imager IR window channel. The matching methods and the statistical verification methods, including both dichotomous and continuous, are described. Results of the comparison, stratified with respect to many different attributes, are presented.