气候变化领域集成服务门户

The new method presented here is based on the original one (Soden and Bretherton, 1993; Stephens et al., 1996; Jackson and Bates, 2001), but it extends linearisations in the formulation of water vapour saturation pressure and in the temperature dependence of the Planck function to second order. To achieve the second-order formulation we derive the retrieval from the beginning, and we find that the most influential ingredient is the use of different optical constants for the two involved channel wavelengths (6.7 and 6.5 μm). The result of adapting the optical constant is an almost perfect match between UTH data measured by HIRS/2 on NOAA-14 and HIRS/3 on NOAA-15 on 1004 common days of operation. The method is applied to both UTH and UTHi. For each case retrieval coefficients are derived.

We present a number of test applications, e.g. on computed brightness temperatures based on high-resolution radiosonde profiles, on the brightness temperatures measured by the satellites on the mentioned 1004 common days of operation. Further, we present time series of the occurrence frequency of high UTHi cases, and we show the overall probability distribution of UTHi. The two latter applications expose indications of moistening of the upper troposphere over the last 35 years.

Finally, we discuss the significance of UTH. We state that UTH algorithms cannot be judged for their correctness or incorrectness, since there is no true UTH. Instead, UTH algorithms should fulfill a number of usefulness postulates, which we suggest and discuss. © Author(s) 2019..