84th AMS Annual Meeting

Monday, 12 January 2004: 4:00 PM
National Weather Service In-situ Radiation Temperature Correction for Radiosonde Replacement System GPS Radiosondes
Room 6A
Carl A. Bower Jr., NOAA/NWS, Silver Spring, MD; and J. J. Fitzgibbon
Poster PDF (291.0 kB)
The National Weather Service is required to make in-situ radiations corrections to radiosonde temperature measurements at individual field sites. Current radiation correction algorithms are based on solar elevation angle, balloon ascent rate, and empirical bias corrections derived from paired radiosonde flights with the NASA ATM Three-Thermistor reference radiosonde. Improved dynamic correction techniques are being developed by NWS radiosonde providers to include the impacts of 27 cloud types, cloud amount, cloud base, and cloud thickness on the in-situ radiation corrections. The cloud information is derived from the World Meteorological Organization coded cloud group message included with the transmission of each upper air sounding. The magnitude of the cloud impacts on the temperature correction will be shown for various cloudiness conditions and results of preliminary flight comparisons of corrected and uncorrected radiosonde temperature profiles against the NASA reference radiosonde will be presented.

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