Global water vapour column amounts have been derived for the first time from measurements of the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY (SCIAMACHY) on the European environmental satellite ENVISAT. For this purpose, two different existing retrieval algorithms have been adapted, namely the Air Mass Corrected Differential Absorption Spectroscopy (AMC-DOAS) which was ...

[1] Midlatitude cyclone tracks over the Southern Ocean are constructed for the 1999–2006 period using two surface data sets: European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) sea-level pressure analyses on one hand, and on the other hand modified analyses in which high-wavenumber pressure variability derived from scatterometer swaths has been injected with a wavelet-based method. A com...

Dust devils and nonrotating dusty plumes are effective uplift mechanisms for fine particles, but their contribution to the global dust budget is uncertain. By applying known bulk thermodynamic criteria to European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) operational analyses, we provide the first global hourly climatology of potential dust devil and dusty plume (PDDP) occurrence. In ag...

In this paper, X-band COSMO-SkyMed© synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind field retrieval is investigated, and the obtained data are used to force a coastal ocean circulation model. The SAR data set consists of 60 X-band Level 1B Multi-Look Ground Detected ScanSAR Huge Region COSMO-SkyMed© SAR data, gathered in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea during the summer and winter seasons of 2010. The SAR-base...

In this paper, a suitable form of the Kalman filter is applied for the simultaneous retrieval of emissivity and surface temperature from SEVIRI observations. Exploiting the Kalman filter dynamical properties, this novel retrieval approach is capable of specifically taking into account for the time continuity of SEVIRI observations. SEVIRI results are compared to surface emissivity-temperature p...

A GCM cloud microphysics parameterization is tested and improved using the CCCMA single-column model with cloud properties obtained at the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean experiment (SHEBA) during the period of November 1997 to September 1998. The ECMWF reanalysis water vapor profile is scaled with rawinsonde data so that the new relative humidity profiles are compatible with rawinsonde...

Most existing ensemble forecast verification statistics are influenced by the quality of not only the ensemble generation scheme, but also the forecast model and the analysis scheme. In this study, a new tool called perturbation versus error correlation analysis (PECA) is introduced that lessens the influence of the initial errors that affect the quality of the analysis. PECA evaluates the ense...

This paper aims to illustrate and test a method, based on the Two-Dimensional Continuous Wavelet Transform (2D-CWT), developed to extract the wind directions from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The knowledge of the wind direction is essential to retrieve the wind speed by using the radar-backscatter versus wind speed algorithms. The method has been applied to 61 SAR images from diff...

A three-dimensional ray tracing model with aiming algorithms for global positioning system (GPS) signal is proposed to make simulations conform to the realistic radio occultation (RO) signal propagation. The two aiming algorithms used in this study ensure the initial and end point ray trajectories are located in the prescribed region. In past studies, the ray tracing techniques applied to the R...

[1] We use a 20-year record of HIRS radiance measurements to evaluate the fidelity of interannual co-variability of tropical humidity and temperature in the reanalyses and GFDL AM2 simulations. Large inconsistencies between the NCEP and ECMWF reanalyses are found as are disagreements between the reanalyses and AM2 simulations. The largest discrepancies occur in the middle and upper troposphere ...