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An improvement of the retrieval of temperature and relative humidity profiles from a combination of active and passive remote sensing

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Abstract

This paper focuses on an improvement of the retrieval of atmospheric temperature and relative humidity profiles through combining active and passive remote sensing. Ground-based microwave radiometer and millimeter-wavelength cloud radar were used to acquire the observations. Cloud base height and cloud thickness determinations from cloud radar were added into the atmospheric profile retrieval process, and a back-propagation neural network method was used as the retrieval tool. Because a substantial amount of data are required to train a neural network, and as microwave radiometer data are insufficient for this purpose, 8 years of radiosonde data from Beijing were used as the database. The monochromatic radiative transfer model was used to calculate the brightness temperatures in the same channels as the microwave radiometer. Parts of the cloud base heights and cloud thicknesses in the training data set were also estimated using the radiosonde data. The accuracy of the results was analyzed through a comparison with L-band sounding radar data and quantified using the mean bias, root-mean-square error (RMSE), and correlation coefficient. The statistical results showed that an inversion with cloud information was the optimal method. Compared with the inversion profiles without cloud information, the RMSE values after adding cloud information reduced to varying degrees for the vast majority of height layers. These reductions were particularly clear in layers with clouds. The maximum reduction in the RMSE for the temperature profile was 2.2 K, while that for the humidity profile was 16%.

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Acknowledgements

This research received funding from the Key Program (2015Z001) of the CAMS. The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Li Liang, Xiaohu Pu, and Fa Tao for their work in improving the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Cloud Physics, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China

    Yunfei Che

  2. Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Shuqing Ma

  3. Hainan Institute of Meteorological Sciences, Haikou, 570203, Hainan, China

    Fenghua Xing

  4. Beijing Municipal Meteorological Observation Center, Beijing, 100089, China

    Siteng Li

  5. National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Yaru Dai

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  1. Yunfei Che
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  2. Shuqing Ma
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  3. Fenghua Xing
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  4. Siteng Li
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  5. Yaru Dai
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Correspondence to Yunfei Che.

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Responsible Editor: S.-W. Kim.

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Che, Y., Ma, S., Xing, F. et al. An improvement of the retrieval of temperature and relative humidity profiles from a combination of active and passive remote sensing. Meteorol Atmos Phys 131, 681–695 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-018-0588-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-018-0588-3

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