Identification

Title

Temperature trends derived from Stratospheric Sounding Unit radiances: The effect of increasing CO₂ on the weighting function

Abstract

Stratospheric Sounding Units (SSU) on the NOAA operational satellites have been the main source of near-global temperature trend data above the lower stratosphere. They have been used extensively for comparison with model-derived trends. The SSU senses in the 15 ±m band of CO₂ and hence the weighting function is sensitive to changes in CO₂ concentrations. The impact of this change in weighting function has been ignored in all recent trend analyses. We show that the apparent trends in global-mean brightness temperature due to the change in weighting function vary from about -0.4 Kdecade⁻¹ to 0.4 Kdecade⁻¹, depending on the altitude sensed by the different SSU channels. For some channels, this apparent trend is of a similar size to the trend deduced from SSU data but ignoring the change in weighting function. In the mid-stratosphere, the revised trends are now significantly more negative and in better agreement with model-calculated trends.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7cr5tj4

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2008-01-24T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact