Evaluation of laser heterodyne radiometry for numerical weather prediction applications

Abstract

This article reports the results of a preliminary mission study to assess the potential of space-borne laser heterodyne radiometry (LHR) for the remote sensing of temperature for assimilation in a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. The LHR instruments are low cost and small in size, lending themselves to a wide variety of satellite platforms. The impact of different configurations of an idealized LHR instrument is assessed against the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), via single-column linear information content analysis, using inputs consistent with the background errors of the Met Office 4D-Var assimilation system. Multiplexed configurations give promising results, in particular for sounding of upper-atmospheric temperatures.KEYWORDS DFS, IASI, information content, laser heterodyne radiometer, numerical weather prediction, temperature sounding, upper atmosphere 1 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Information content analysis for a novel TES-based hyperspectral microwave atmospheric sounding instrument

“…Much of the theoretical background of the Optimal estimation method (OE) can be found in detail in Rodgers (2000) [21]. This theory has been used in many other information content studies [22][23][24]. In this section, the Bayesian framework of atmospheric inverse problems and the formulation used for the information content analysis will be described.…”

“…The line-HT-FRTC has been used to calculate the analytic Jacobians for temperature and humidity. The HT-FRTC model has been used in several other airborne and spaceborne remote sensing studies (recently, it has been used for investigating a new high-resolution infrared instrument, Laser Heterodyne Radiometer (LHR) for numerical weather prediction application applications [24]. The line-HT-FRTC model has also been compared and validated with other radiative transfer models [32].…”

“…The matrix is complex in structure and it is the combination of background error standard deviation and vertical error correlations. It is an important component of the analysis as the information content will be calculated with respect to the background information [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. As this study is mainly focused on temperature and water vapour measurements, the matrix used here only comprises of temperature ( ) and humidity ( ) errors.…”

End-to-End Instrument Performance Simulation System (EIPS) Framework: Application to Satellite Microwave Atmospheric Sounding Systems

“…Out of the eight profiles, profile 1 is the US standard atmosphere and seven of these profiles (Profile 2 to 8) have been extracted directly from the Met Office UM in March 2012. These profiles have been used in recent studies in [26,29]. The background error-covariance matrix was constructed using a randomisation method.…”

“…The HT-FRTC has been applied across the EM spectrum in a number of previous studies, both in the infrared [20][21][22][23] and in the short-wave and part of the ultraviolet [24,25]. The HT-FRTC has been used to evaluate different configurations of an infrared satellite radiometer concept based on laser heterodyne technology [26]. Using the HT-FRTC, the EIPS framework becomes applicable to any passive spectral sensor from the ultraviolet (UV) to the microwave (MW).…”