Defining the state of the atmosphere is an essential task in order for the improvements in radiative and single-column models to become a reality. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) currently relies on radiosondes to gather the detailed soundings of temperature, pressure, moisture, and wind because automated remote-sensing methods have been heretofore unable to provide this inf...

Fallstreak cirrus clouds are associated with supersaturated air, together with waves, instabilities and/or turbulence; however, their precise cause is usually uncertain. This paper uses already-published satellite, radiosonde and radar data, reanalysed to study some large fallstreaks which had been previously overlooked. The fallstreaks – up to 60 km long with a parent cloud 20 km wide – are ca...

Multiple satellite records of tropical-mean water vapor are compared with a general circulation model (GCM) simulation to assess the ability to monitor and to predict low-frequency changes in total precipitable water. Particular attention is focused on the drying between 1979 and 1995 recorded by a TOVS statistical retrieval that is calibrated to radiosondes. Both a GCM integrated with observed...

The comparison of the integrated precipitable water vapor (IPWV) retrieved by GPS, microwave radiometer, solar spectrometer and radiosondes, operated within the French field campaign ESCOMPTE, shows an overall good agreement. The time dependent relative fluctuation as well as the absolute amount of water vapor match with high accuracy. The software package AWATOS (Atmospheric WAter vapor TOmogr...

The authors used radiosonde temperature profiles of several sites to derive the temperature changing rate of different sites, altitudes and seasons. There are mainly two goals of this manuscript: the first one is to compare the temperature changing rate (correction factors) for launch schedule of fewer times (2, 4 times) with 8 times per day; the second goal is to estimate the temperature diffe...

Tropospheric delay is one of the primary error sources Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Usually, a traditional empirical model can be corrected, which uses trigonometric function fixed amplitude and frequency for time fitting. However, models only retain low-frequency information zenith tropospheric (ZTD), limits its application in high resolution. To solve this problem, global grid m...