Refining the CLARREO Mission By Correlating Ozone and Temperature Profiles With IASA Five-Year Variances Infrared Brightness Temperature Spectra

The CLARREO mission has been established by NASA's Langley Research Center to establish benchmark measurements using traceable international standards (SI) through various independent paths. Time standard, temperature standard, and solar/lunar standard are used to ensure unbiased and simple processing methods, rendering the claims of atmospheric trends irrefutable.

The objective of this study is to correlate the infrared brightness temperature spectra in ten degree latitude zones with time and space coincident vertical profiles of atmospheric temperature and ozone concentration. Mean and standard deviation vertical profiles were computed from the north pole and south pole in ten degree and thirty degree latitude zones. Corresponding brightness temperature mean spectra were correlated with the temperature and ozone vertical profiles.

The satellite observations used in this study are from a series of hyperspectral infrared sounders developed for the operational assimilation into numerical weather prediction models (NWP). The NASA AQUA satellite with the AIRS sensor with data record beginning in September 2002. The EUMETSAT METOP satellite series with the IASI sensor with data record beginning in January 2007. The NASA/NOAA Suomi-NPP satellite with the CrIS and OMPS sensors with data record beginning in April 2012. The ozone profile observations were obtained from the OMPS data portal with data product named OMPS Limb Profiler- Suomi NPP- LP-L2-O3-DAILY.

The stratospheric temperature, ozone and water vapor model data were obtained from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, ECMWF. ERA-Interim is a global atmospheric reanalysis with special resolution of approximately 80 km on 60 vertical levels from the surface up to 0.1 hpa. ERA-Interim allows monitoring of the variability and change of global climate, thereby contributing to the understanding and attribution of climate change.

Previous findings (Brindley et al. 2015) imply that at the largest spatial scales, fluctuations in the mid to upper tropospheric temperatures and water vapor, and not cloud or surface temperature, play the dominant role in determining the level of interannual variability in all sky outgoing longwave radiation. Enhanced variability was seen in the 9.6 micron ozone band. In this study, we quantify the contribution of ozone fluctuations to the variability of the observed atmospheric infrared radiation to space.

Possible implications of this work could lead to disentangling a possible correlation between carbon dioxide and ozone. The trends in ozone may mask the effects of carbon dioxide. An increase in carbon dioxide causes a cooling effect in the stratosphere whereas ozone recovery should lead to a warming of the stratosphere.