A Comparison of the TOVS temperature porfile iwht the ECMWF analysis and staion -observed data in middle and high southern latitudes

Temperature observations from 16 radiosonde stations are used to evaluate the performance of the Television Infrared Observational Satellite (TIROS) Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) Pathfinder Path A dataset over Antarctica from 1987 to 1993. Preliminary results show that TOVS Path A has a good agreement with radiosonde observations. The correlation coefficients between these two observations are about 98% at the collocated radiosonde stations. In most stations, systematic errors are found where the satellite soundings are colder than their collocated radiosonde measurements. The satellite performance also varies seasonally. The satellite soundings agree better with the radiosonde observations during winter than during summer. Moreover, the TOVS Path A data are also compared with the ECMWF reanalysis in this study. Results from this work suggest that TOVS Path A data are suitable for the climate change study over the Antarctic continent.