The focus of this paper is to use radio occultation (RO) and available radiosonde data together to characterize the frequency as well as vertical and horizontal extent of cold air aloft events. The high vertical resolution of RO and its quality of being most accurate in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere make it a good candidate for detecting the cold air's vertical extent. Focus is set on regions over the Arctic and Alaska over a 7 year time period. COSMIC dry and wet temperature products from UCAR are analyzed. Similar analyses are also made for NASA's AIRS version 6 temperature products. Comparisons of the AIRS and COSMIC analyses help highlight each of the instrumentations strengths in this application. This work will provide insight on how RO and hyperspectral infrared sounder retrievals can be used in real-time applications to make use of the direct broadcast capability on Suomi-NPP and JPSS and the product applications available through the Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP) project.
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