85th AMS Annual Meeting

Monday, 10 January 2005: 10:45 AM
Near real-time operational products from AIRS
Mitchell D. Goldberg, NOAA/NESDIS/ORA, Camp Springs, MD; and C. D. Barnet, W. Wolf, L. Zhou, and M. Divakarla
Since October, 2002, NESDIS has provided specially tailored radiance and retrieval products derived from Aqua AIRS and AMSU-A observations operationally (24 hours x 7 days) to a number of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) centers, including NCEP, ECMWF and the UK Met. Office. The retrieval products include atmospheric temperature, moisture and ozone as well as surface parameters of temperature and emissivity. The radiance products, primarily used by the numerical weather prediction community, include the originally observed spectra which has 95% cloud contamination, cloud-cleared radiances, which removes the effects of clouds and has a yield of approximately 50%, and reconstructed observed and reconstructed cloud-cleared radiances from Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA is used for a) data compression b) reconstructing radiances with the properties of reduced noise, c) independent instrument noise estimation, d) quality control, and e) deriving the retrieval first guess used in the AIRS processing software. The AIRS temperature and moisture retrieval are significantly more accurate than AMSU-only retrievals in clear, cloud contaminated and cloud-cleared conditions. At the conference, we will describe in more detail the different products available from AIRS in near real-time and also present the accuracy of the AIRS retrievals and the cloud-cleared radiances.

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