Amalgamation of geostationary and polar orbiting satellite sounder data for atmospheric profiling

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) hourly sounder measurements provide high time resolution and good sensitivity for troposphere temperature and moisture profiles. The Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit (AMSU-A) measurements from the NOAA-15 polar orbiting satellite provide much better temperature information in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, and also are less sensitive to the cloud. In order to take advantage of both the AMSU-A and the GOES sounder measurements, the time and space co-located sounder data from both GOES and NOAA-15 satellites are collected for retrieving the atmospheric temperature and moisture profile. An algorithm for the retrieval processing is developed, the AMSU-A measurements are limb adjusted and remapped to the GOES sounder field of view (FOV). Retrieval results from GOES sounder and AMSU-A measurements are evaluated in terms of Root Mean Square (RMS) differences between retrieved profiles and radiosonde observations (RAOB). Results from both simulated and real time sounder measurements show the significant improvement of the retrievals from amalgamation of GOES sounder and AMSU-A measurements over either the GOES sounder only retrievals, or the AMSU-A only retrievals. Further study will focus on extrapolating the combined AMSU-A/GOES retrievals with hourly GOES only measurements and applying the retrieval products from this amalgamation in the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model.