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Thermodynamic Atmospheric Profiling During The 2010 Winter Olympics Using Ground-based Microwave Radiometry

Abstract

Ground-based microwave radiometer profilers in the 20-60-GHz range operate continuously at numerous sites in different climate regions. Recent work suggests that a 1-D variational (1-DVAR) technique, coupling radiometric observations with outputs from a numerical weather prediction model, may outperform traditional retrieval methods for temperature and humidity profiling. The 1-DVAR technique is applied here to observations from a commercially available microwave radiometer deployed at Whistler, British Columbia, which was operated by Environment Canada to support nowcasting and short-term weather forecasting during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The analysis period included rain, sleet, and snow events (~235-mm total accumulation and rates up to 18 mm/h). The 1-DVAR method is applied quasi-operationally, i.e., as it could have been applied in real time, as no data were culled. The 1-DVAR-achieved accuracy has been evaluated by using simultaneous radiosonde and ceilometer observations as reference. For atmospheric profiling from the surface to 10 km, we obtain retrieval errors within 1.5 K for temperature and 0.5 g/m³ for water vapor density. The retrieval accuracy for column-integrated water vapor is 0.8 kgm², with small bias (-0.1 kgm2) and excellent correlation (0.96). The retrieval of cloud properties shows a high probability of detection of cloud/no cloud (0.8/0.9, respectively), low false-alarm ratio (0.1), and cloud-base height estimate error within ~0., 60 km.

Article / Publication Data
Active/Online
YES
Volume
49
Available Metadata
DOI ↗
Fiscal Year
Peer Reviewed
YES
Publication Name
Ieee Transactions On Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Published On
December 27, 2011
Publisher Name
IEEEXplore
Print Volume
49
Print Number
12
Page Range
4959-4969
Issue
12
URL ↗

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