PBL Height From AIRS, GPS RO, and MERRA‐2 Products in NASA GES DISC and Their 10‐Year Seasonal Mean Intercomparison

Abstract

The planetary boundary layer (PBL), also called the atmospheric boundary layer, is the near-surface section of the atmosphere. The PBL height (PBLH) is referred to as the altitude from the surface to the top of the PBL and is also known as the PBL depth or thickness. Surface forcing response, drag, turbulence, and vertical mixing are strongly evident here and play a critical role within PBL compared to their importance in the overlying "free atmosphere" (Stull, 1988). The PBLH is a vital parameter in climate models, weather forecasts, and air quality prediction (Allabakash & Lim, 2020;Yin et al., 2019). PBLH data are available from the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), which provides data processing, archiving, and distribution services for many Earth science products. PBLH is a data parameter in three products served by GES DISC, which are produced from the atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS), the global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation (RO) experiment, and the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications-2 (MERRA-2) reanalysis product.The AIRS is a hyperspectral infrared sounder onboard NASA's Aqua satellite, which was launched in May 2002 into a Sun-synchronous polar orbit (Aumann et al., 2003). It provides observations of the atmospheric state relevant to the global water and energy balance. These observations include temperature and water vapor profiles, outgoing longwave radiation, cloud properties, and trace gases. The GES DISC, in collaboration with the NASA Sounder Team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, released the AIRS data product from the version 7 (V7) algorithm in July 2020. The new version product represents a significant improvement over version 6 (V6), especially the infrared-only and water vapor retrieval (Yue & Lambrigtsen, 2020). PBLH is a parameter newly added in the AIRS support product from V6. The AIRS support product has some different parameters and many more vertical levels than the standard product.The GPS RO data set presently served by the GES DISC is a part of the Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) project. It provides only annual and seasonal averaged

Planetary Boundary Layer Height Estimates From ICESat-2 and CATS Backscatter Measurements

“…Throughout most of the ocean, areas of higher and lower PBLH correspond. Ding et al (2021) also found similar patterns and a low-bias in the MERRA-2 PBLH over oceans when comparing the MERRA-2 data to AIRS and COSMIC Radio Occultation estimates of PBLH.…”

Determination of the human impact on the drop in NO2 air pollution due to total COVID-19 lockdown using Human-Influenced Air Pollution Decrease Index (HIAPDI)

“…As a result, PBLH has an impact on temperature and near-surface winds. PBLH retrievals from various sources of satellite measurements were intercompared in recent research ( Ding et al, 2021 ).…”

Detail Enhancement of AIRS/AMSU Temperature and Moisture Profiles Using a 3D Deep Neural Network

“…We also evaluated PBLH from the retrievals in comparison to ECMWF for the same land, daytime test profiles. While many approaches can be used to evaluate PBLH and the best choice is typically regime-dependent, we used a vertical gradient approach similar to Seidel et al (Seidel, Ao, & Li, 2010).While relative humidity gradient is one quantity which has previously been used to evaluate PBLH (Ding, Iredell, Theobald, Wei, & Meyer, 2021), we evaluated gradients in both 𝑞 and 𝑇 𝑝𝑜𝑡 individually, as both are useful indicators of the PBL top as illustrated in Figure 1, and both are more directly related to the variables retrieved by the algorithms. We also check PBLH derived from 𝑞 against the PBLH derived from 𝑇 𝑝𝑜𝑡 to confirm whether they are mutually consistent as physically expected.…”