Temperature and humidity profiling in the Arctic using millimeter-wave radiometry

Abstract

A One Dimentional Variational (1DVAR) retrieval technique has been developed for obtaining temperature and humidity profiles from observations of the Ground-based Scanning Radiometer (GSR) operating at millimeter and submillimeter waves. The GSR participated in two Arctic experiments held at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program in Barrow, Alaska: the Water Vapor Intensive Operational Period (WVIOP, March-April 2004) and the Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaign (RHUBC, February-March 2007); data from both experiments are used in this paper. Temperature and humidity profiles retrieved with the 1DVAR technique are compared with simultaneous radiosonde observations. Examples and statistical results are presented and discussed to demonstrate the achieved retrieval accuracy and vertical resolution.