Water Vapour & Temperature

An optimal estimation technique (Li et al., 2000) is applied to data from the Advanced TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (ATOVS) on board NOAA and MetOp satellites to retrieve humidity and temperature profiles and total column water vapour products (HSH, HLW, and HTW). The product also contains the number of observations and uncertainty measures and has global coverage, i.e., within ±180° longitude and ±80° latitude. They are available as daily and monthly averages in Behrmann cylindrical equal area projection with a spatial resolution of 90 km x 90 km. Further details on the products in general, on retrieval details and physical basis as well as on quality can be found in the Product User Manual (PUM), the Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents (ATBD), and the Validation Reports (ValRep).
The operational monitoring and the reprocessed climate data record products can be ordered via the Web User Interface.

References:

• Courcoux, N. and Schröder, M.: The CM SAF ATOVS data record: overview of methodology and evaluation of total column water and profiles of tropospheric humidity, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 7, 397-414, doi:10.5194/essd-7-397-2015, 2015.

MS / Aug2018