Identification

Title

Validation of GOME-2/MetOp-A total water vapour column using reference radiosonde data from the GRUAN network

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to validate the total water vapour column (TWVC) measured by the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) satellite sensor and generated using the GOME Data Processor (GDP) retrieval algorithm developed by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). For this purpose, spatially and temporally collocated TWVC data from highly accurate sounding measurements for the period January 2009-May 2014 at six sites are used. These balloon-borne data are provided by the GCOS Reference Upper-Air Network (GRUAN). The correlation between GOME-2 and sounding TWVC data is reasonably good (determination coefficient, R², of 0.89) when all available radiosondes (1400) are employed in the inter-comparison. When cloud-free cases (544) are selected by means of the satellite cloud fraction (CF < 5%), the correlation exhibits a remarkable improvement (R² ~ 0.95). Nevertheless, the analysis of the relative differences between GOME-2 and GRUAN data shows a mean absolute bias error (weighted with the combined uncertainty derived from the estimated errors of both data sets) of 15% for all-sky conditions (9% for cloud-free cases). These results evidence a notable bias in the satellite TWVC data against the reference balloon-borne measurements, partially related to the cloudy conditions during the satellite overpass. The detailed analysis of the influence of cloud properties - CF, cloud top albedo (CTA) and cloud top pressure (CTP) - on the satellite-sounding differences reveals, as expected, a large effect of clouds in the GOME-2 TWVC data. For instance, the relative differences exhibit a large negative dependence on CTA, varying from -6 to -23% when CTA rises from 0.3 to 0.8. Furthermore, the satellite-sounding TWVC differences show a strong dependence on the satellite solar zenith angle (SZA) for values above 50°. Hence the smallest relative differences found in this satellite-sounding comparison are achieved for those cloud-free cases with satellite SZA below 50°. Finally, the relative differences also show a negative dependence on the reference TWVC values, e.g. changing from +10% (TWVC below 10 mm) to -10% (TWVC above 40 mm) when cloud-free conditions with SZA below 50° are selected. Overall, relative differences within ±10% with respect to reference sounding data for a large range of TWVC values can be considered as a good result for satellite retrievals.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7tb184h

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

2015-03-06T00:00:00Z

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