The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) aboard the Aqua satellite, which is one of the Earth Observing System satellites managed by National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration, provides global measurements of the water vapor in the atmosphere using infrared (IR) channels. In this paper, we restored precipitable water vapor (PWV) over a permanent GPS station in Incheon using the IR measurements of AIRS and compared the result with GPS-based PWV estimates. As a result, AIRS PWV had similar trends with GPS PWV; the bias of AIRS PWV against GPS PWV is 0.3 cm and root mean square error (RMSE) 0.7 cm. In addition, the correlation coefficient between AIRS PWV and GPS PWV was 0.89. Thus we conclude that the AIRS PWV reflects local characteristics of the water vapor content.
The atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS) sensor loaded on the Aqua satellite observes the global vertical structure of atmosphere and enables verification of the water vapor distribution over the entire area of South Korea. In this study, we performed a comparative analysis of the accuracy of the total precipitable water (TPW) provided as the AIRS level 2 standard retrieval product by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) over the South Korean area using the global positioning system (GPS) TPW data. The analysis TPW for the period of one year in 2008 showed that the accuracy of the data produced by the combination of the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit sensor with the AIRS sensor to correct the effect of clouds (AIRS-X) was higher than that of the AIRS IR-only data (AIRS-I). The annual means of the root mean square error with reference to the GPS data were 5.2 kg/m 2 and 4.3 kg/m 2 for AIRS-I and AIRS-X, respectively. The accuracy of AIRS-X was higher in summer than in winter while measurement values of AIRS-I and AIRS-X were lower than those of GPS TPW to some extent.
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