Solar radiation error research of sounding temperature sensor

Air temperature of high altitude is considered as an important factor in both weather forecast and climate change research. Due to the increasing amount of attention that has been focused on numerical weather forecast and climate change research, it is desired that the accuracy of upper air temperature measurement can be reduced to 0.1 °C. During the day, direct solar radiation produces an additional and considerably larger error on the temperature measurement, which has become the bottleneck when improving the accuracy of upper air radiosonde temperature sensors. Currently, the experiments and theoretical calculations are the methods used to study the correction of solar radiation heating error. Dominque (2003) built a simple low-pressure radiation wind tunnel platform for radiation error research. However, the measurement result are obtained by this simple experiment platform are not representative of the real sounding data. Based on the previous work, James (1990, 1995) built a simplified model of rod thermistor for analyzing solar radiation error. But the Reynolds number in the formula can only be obtained by empirical estimation.