[1] This paper documents the climatological mean features of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) monthly mean tropospheric air temperature (ta, K) and specific humidity (hus, kg/kg) products as part of the Obs4MIPs project and compares them to those from NASA's Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) for validation and 16 models from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) for CMIP5 model evaluation. MERRA is warmer than AIRS in the free troposphere but colder in the boundary layer with differences typically less than 1 K. MERRA is also drier (~10%) than AIRS in the tropical boundary layer but wetter (~30%) in the tropical free troposphere and the extratropical troposphere. In particular, the large MERRA-AIRS specific humidity differences are mainly located in the deep convective cloudy regions indicating that the low sampling of AIRS in the cloudy regions may be the main reason for these differences. In comparison to AIRS and MERRA, the sixteen CMIP5 models can generally reproduce the climatological features of tropospheric air temperature and specific humidity well, but several noticeable biases exist. The models have a tropospheric cold bias (around 2 K), especially in the extratropical upper troposphere, and a double-ITCZ problem in the troposphere from 1000 hPa to 300 hPa, especially in the tropical Pacific. The upper-tropospheric cold bias exists in the most (13 of 16) models, and the double-ITCZ bias is found in all 16 CMIP5 models. Both biases are independent of the reference dataset used (AIRS or MERRA).

Abstract. The version 6 cloud products of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) instrument suite are described. The cloud top temperature, pressure, and height and effective cloud fraction are now reported at the AIRS field-of-view (FOV) resolution. Significant improvements in cloud height assignment over version 5 are shown with FOV-scale comparisons to cloud vertical structure observed by the CloudSat 94 GHz radar and the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP). Cloud thermodynamic phase (ice, liquid, and unknown phase), ice cloud effective diameter (D e ), and ice cloud optical thickness (τ ) are derived using an optimal estimation methodology for AIRS FOVs, and global distributions for 2007 are presented. The largest values of τ are found in the storm tracks and near convection in the tropics, while D e is largest on the equatorial side of the midlatitude storm tracks in both hemispheres, and lowest in tropical thin cirrus and the winter polar atmosphere. Over the Maritime Continent the diurnal variability of τ is significantly larger than for the total cloud fraction, ice cloud frequency, and D e , and is anchored to the island archipelago morphology. Important differences are described between northern and southern hemispheric midlatitude cyclones using storm center composites. The infrared-based cloud retrievals of AIRS provide unique, decadal-scale and global observations of clouds over portions of the diurnal and annual cycles, and capture variability within the mesoscale and synoptic scales at all latitudes.

The Version 6 cloud products of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) instrument suite are described. The cloud top temperature, pressure, and height and effective cloud fraction are now reported at the AIRS field of view (FOV) resolution. Significant improvements in cloud height assignment over Version 5 are shown with pixel-scale comparisons to cloud vertical structure observed by the CloudSat 94 GHz radar and the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP). Cloud thermodynamic phase (ice, liquid, and unknown phase), ice cloud effective diameter (D_e), and ice cloud optical thickness (τ) are derived using an optimal estimation methodology for AIRS FOVs, and global distributions for January 2007 are presented. The largest values of τ are found in the storm tracks and near convection in the Tropics, while D_e is largest on the equatorial side of the midlatitude storm tracks in both hemispheres, and lowest in tropical thin cirrus and the winter polar atmosphere. Over the Maritime Continent the diurnal cycle of τ is significantly larger than for the total cloud fraction, ice cloud frequency, and D_e, and is anchored to the island archipelago morphology. Important differences are described between northern and southern hemispheric midlatitude cyclones using storm center composites. The infrared-based cloud retrievals of AIRS provide unique, decadal-scale and global observations of clouds over the diurnal and annual cycles, and captures variability within the mesoscale and synoptic scales at all latitudes

[1] Hyperspectral infrared sounders require accurate knowledge of the land surface emissivity (LSE) to retrieve important climate variables such as surface temperature, air temperature, and total water vapor from space. This study provides a method for validating and assessing the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) version 5 LSE product using high-spatial resolution data (90 m) from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) which has five bands in the thermal infrared region (8-12 mm, 1250-833 cm À1 ) and high-spectral resolution laboratory measurements of sand samples collected over the Namib and Kalahari deserts in southern Africa. Results indicate that the mean, absolute daytime LSE difference between AIRS and the laboratory results for six wavelengths in window regions between 3.9 and 11.4 mm (2564-877 cm À1 ) was 2.3% over the Namib and 0.70% over the Kalahari, while the mean difference with ASTER was 2.3% over the Namib and 2.26% over the Kalahari for four bands between 8 and 12 mm. Systematic modeling and surface dependent AIRS LSE retrieval errors such as large discrepancies between day and nighttime shortwave LSE (up to 15%), unphysical values (LSE >1), and large daytime temporal variations in the shortwave region (up to 30%) are further discussed.

Data from hyperspectral infrared sounders are routinely ingested worldwide by the National Weather Centers. The cloud‐free fraction of this data is used for initializing forecasts which include temperature, water vapor, water cloud, and ice cloud profiles on a global grid. Although the data from these sounders are sensitive to the vertical distribution of ice and liquid water in clouds, this information is not fully utilized. In the future, this information could be used for validating clouds in National Weather Center models and for initializing forecasts. We evaluate how well the calculated radiances from hyperspectral Radiative Transfer Models (RTMs) compare to cloudy radiances observed by AIRS and to one another. Vertical profiles of the clouds, temperature, and water vapor from the European Center for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasting were used as input for the RTMs. For nonfrozen ocean day and night data, the histograms derived from the calculations by several RTMs at 900 cm−1 have a better than 0.95 correlation with the histogram derived from the AIRS observations, with a bias relative to AIRS of typically less than 2 K. Differences in the cloud physics and cloud overlap assumptions result in little bias between the RTMs, but the standard deviation of the differences ranges from 6 to 12 K. Results at 2,616 cm−1 at night are reasonably consistent with results at 900 cm−1. Except for RTMs which use full scattering calculations, the bias and histogram correlations at 2,616 cm−1 are inferior to those at 900 cm−1 for daytime calculations.