SUMMARY ERA-40 is a re-analysis of meteorological observations from September 1957 to August 2002 produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in collaboration with many institutions. The observing system changed considerably over this re-analysis period, with assimilable data provided by a succession of satellite-borne instruments from the 1970s onwards, supplemented by increasing numbers of observations from aircraft, ocean-buoys and other surface platforms, but with a declining number of radiosonde ascents since the late 1980s. The observations used in ERA-40 were accumulated from many sources. The first part of this paper describes the data acquisition and the principal changes in data type and coverage over the period. It also describes the data assimilation system used for ERA-40. This benefited from many of the changes introduced into operational forecasting since the mid-1990s, when the systems used for the 15-year ECMWF re-analysis (ERA-15) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) re-analysis were implemented. Several of the improvements are discussed. General aspects of the production of the analyses are also summarized.A number of results indicative of the overall performance of the data assimilation system, and implicitly of the observing system, are presented and discussed. The comparison of background (short-range) forecasts and analyses with observations, the consistency of the global mass budget, the magnitude of differences between analysis and background fields and the accuracy of medium-range forecasts run from the ERA-40 analyses are illustrated. Several results demonstrate the marked improvement that was made to the observing system for the * Corresponding author: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Shinfield Park, Reading RG2 9AX, UK. e-mail: adrian.simmons@ecmwf. southern hemisphere in the 1970s, particularly towards the end of the decade. In contrast, the synoptic quality of the analysis for the northern hemisphere is sufficient to provide forecasts that remain skilful well into the medium range for all years. Two particular problems are also examined: excessive precipitation over tropical oceans and a too strong Brewer-Dobson circulation, both of which are pronounced in later years. Several other aspects of the quality of the re-analyses revealed by monitoring and validation studies are summarized. Expectations that the 'second-generation' ERA-40 re-analysis would provide products that are better than those from the firstgeneration ERA-15 and NCEP/NCAR re-analyses are found to have been met in most cases.

To obtain accurate estimates of surface and cloud parameters from satellite radiance data a scheme has to be devised which identifies cloud-free and cloud-filled pixels (i.e. fields of view). Such a scheme has been developed for application to high resolution (1'1 km pixel) images recorded over Western Europe and the North Atlantic by the AYHRR on the TIROS-NjNOAA polar orbiters. The scheme consists of five daytime or five night-time tests applied to each individual pixel to determine whether that pixel is cloud-free, partly cloudy or cloud-filled.The pixelis only identifiedas cloud-free or cloud-filledifit passes all the tests to identify that condition; otherwise it is assumed to be partly cloudy. Surface parameters (e.g. skin temperature, reflectance, vegetation index, snow cover) can then be inferred from the cloud-free radiances, and cloud parameters (e.g.cloud top temperature, optical depth and liquid water content) from the cloud-filled radiances. Only fractional cloud cover is derived from the partly cloudy pixels which, together with the number of cloud-filled pixels, gives total cloud cover over a given area. The scheme has been successfully applied to data for all seasons, including images with unusually cold or warm surface temperatures. To assess the method both daytime and night-time NOAA-9 passes over the U.K. were obtained for a week in April 1985 and some results from this data set are presented here.

[1] A robust method to detect volcanic ash, using data from the infrared channels of the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager instrument mounted on-board Meteosat Second Generation, is presented. The simultaneous retrieval of quantitative volcanic ash physical properties using a one-dimensional variational analysis framework is also described. These methods are demonstrated using data from the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010. Sensitivity experiments are presented which show that the retrieved quantities are strongly dependent on the choice of ash refractive index data used in the retrieval scheme's radiative transfer model. Validation of the retrieved properties is carried out against lidar data, which demonstrate that the retrievals are realistic, and which indicate the most suitable refractive index data sets to use for these cases.

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Abstract. This paper gives an update of the RTTOV (Radiative Transfer for TOVS) fast radiative transfer model, which is widely used in the satellite retrieval and data assimilation communities. RTTOV is a fast radiative transfer model for simulating top-of-atmosphere radiances from passive visible, infrared and microwave downward-viewing satellite radiometers. In addition to the forward model, it also optionally computes the tangent linear, adjoint and Jacobian matrix providing changes in radiances for profile variable perturbations assuming a linear relationship about a given atmospheric state. This makes it a useful tool for developing physical retrievals from satellite radiances, for direct radiance assimilation in NWP models, for simulating future instruments, and for training or teaching with a graphical user interface. An overview of the RTTOV model is given, highlighting the updates and increased capability of the latest versions, and it gives some examples of its current performance when compared with more accurate line-by-line radiative transfer models and a few selected observations. The improvement over the original version of the model released in 1999 is demonstrated.

To assimilate atmospheric and surface radiance measurements from satellites in a numerical weather prediction model, a fast radiative transfer model is required to compute radiances from the model first guess fields at every observation point. Such a model for satellite infrared and microwave radiance measurements is used operationally for the assimilation of TIROS operational vertical sounder radiances at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. An improved version of this model has been developed which requires ozone, in addition to temperature and water vapour, in the input profile and it has been generalized to compute radiances for other satellite radiometers using the same code. Instruments such as the high resolution infrared radiation sounder and the advanced microwave sounding unit on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration polar orbiters, the METEOSAT water vapour imager and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite infrared sounder have been simulated. It is demonstrated, by comparisons with line-by-line model computed radiances, that the fast model can reproduce the line-by-line model radiances for the TIROS operational vertical sounder stratospheric temperature sounding channels to an accuracy below the instrumental noise. The tropospheric, surface sensing, water vapour and ozone channel radiances cannot be predicted to such an accuracy, but still accurately enough for numerical weather prediction assimilation. A comparison of measured TIROS operational vertical sounder radiances with predicted values from numerical weather prediction model analyses gives larger differences than would be expected from the combination of the fast model and instrument related errors for most channels. The validity of the tangent linear approximation of the model gradient for typical radiance departures is also explored, with several examples, for the high resolution infrared radiation sounder/advanced microwave sounding unit instrument combination. The tangent-linear approximation is valid for temperature but significant departures from linearity about the first guess profile are observed for water vapour and ozone. Cloud affected infrared radiances have a highly non-linear response.

Using co-locations of three different observation types of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) gives enough information to enable the standard deviation of error on each observation type to be derived. SSTs derived from the Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) instruments are used, along with SST observations from buoys. Various assumptions are made within the error theory including that the errors are not correlated, which should be the case for three independent data sources. An attempt is made to show that this assumption is valid and also that the covariances between the observations due to representativity error are negligible. Overall, the AATSR observations are shown to have a very small standard deviation of error of 0.16K, whilst the buoy SSTs have an error of 0.23K and the AMSR-E SST observations have an error of 0.42K.

Abstract. The goals of this study are the evaluation of current fast radiative transfer models (RTMs) and line-by-line (LBL) models. The intercomparison focuses on the modeling of 11 representative sounding channels routinely used at numerical weather prediction centers: 7 HIRS (High-resolution Infrared Sounder) and 4 AMSU (advanced microwave sounding unit) channels. Interest in this topic was evident by the participation of 24 scientists from 16 institutions. An ensemble of 42 diverse atmospheres was used and results compiled for 19 infrared models and 10 microwave models, including several LBL RTMs. For the first time, not only radiances but also Jacobians (of temperature, water vapor, and ozone) were compared to various LBL models for many channels. In the infrared, LBL models typically agree to within 0.05-0.15 K (standard deviation) in terms of top-of-the-atmosphere brightness temperature (BT). Individual differences up to 0.5 K still exist, systematic in some channels, and linked to the type of atmosphere in others.The best fast models emulate LBL BTs to within 0.25 K, but no model achieves this desirable level of success for all channels. The ozone modeling is particularly challenging. In the microwave, fast models generally do quite well against the LBL model to which they were tuned. However, significant differences were noted among LBL models. Extending the intercomparison to the Jacobians proved very useful in detecting subtle or more obvious modeling errors. In addition, total and single gas optical depths were calculated, which provided additional insight on the nature of differences.