Synergy of ground based and satellite observations highly beneficial

Pub­lished in Jour­nal of Applied Mete­o­rol­o­gy and Cli­ma­tol­ogy 59, 7, 2020:

Atmos­pher­ic sta­bil­i­ty plays an essen­tial role in the evo­lu­tion of weath­er events. While the upper tro­pos­phere is sam­pled by satel­lite sen­sors, and in situ sen­sors mea­sure the atmos­pher­ic state close to the sur­face, only spo­radic infor­ma­tion from radioson­des or air­craft obser­va­tions is avail­able in the plan­e­tary bound­ary lay­er. Ground-based remote sens­ing offers the pos­si­bil­i­ty to con­tin­u­ous­ly and auto­mat­i­cal­ly mon­i­tor the atmos­pher­ic state in the bound­ary lay­er. Microwave radiome­ters (MWR) pro­vide tem­po­ral­ly resolved tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty pro­files in the bound­ary lay­er and accu­rate val­ues of inte­grat­ed water vapor and liq­uid water path, and the dif­fer­en­tial absorp­tion lidar (DIAL) mea­sures humid­i­ty pro­files with high ver­ti­cal and tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion up to 3000‑m height. Both instru­ments have the poten­tial to com­ple­ment satel­lite obser­va­tions by addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion from the low­est atmos­pher­ic lay­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly under cloudy con­di­tions. This study presents a neur­al net­work retrieval for sta­bil­i­ty indices, inte­grat­ed water vapor, and liq­uid water path from sim­u­lat­ed satel­lite- and ground-based mea­sure­ments based on the COSMO region­al reanaly­sis (COSMO-REA2). Focus­ing on the tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion, the satel­lite-based instru­ments con­sid­ered in the study are the cur­rent­ly oper­a­tional Spin­ning Enhanced Vis­i­ble and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) and the future Infrared Sounder (IRS), both in geo­sta­tion­ary orbit. Rel­a­tive to the retrieval based on satel­lite obser­va­tions, the addi­tion­al ground-based MWR/DIAL mea­sure­ments pro­vide valu­able improve­ments not only in the pres­ence of clouds, which rep­re­sent a lim­it­ing fac­tor for infrared SEVIRI/IRS, but also under clear-sky con­di­tions. The root-mean-square error for con­vec­tive avail­able poten­tial ener­gy, for instance, is reduced by 24% if IRS obser­va­tions are com­ple­ment­ed by ground-based MWR mea­sure­ments.

Offi­cial title: Syn­er­gy of Satel­lite- and Ground-Based Obser­va­tions for Con­tin­u­ous Mon­i­tor­ing of Atmos­pher­ic Sta­bil­i­ty, Liq­uid Water Path, and Inte­grat­ed Water Vapor: The­o­ret­i­cal Eval­u­a­tions Using Reanaly­sis and Neur­al Net­works

Authors: Maria Toporov and Ulrich Löh­n­ert

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