12.1.1 Definitions The following definitions from WMO (1992; 2003a) are relevant to upper air measurements using a radiosonde: Radiosonde: Instrument intended to be carried by a balloon through the atmosphere, equipped with devices to measure one or several meteorological variables (pressure, temperature, humidity, etc.), and provided with a radio transmitter for sending this information to the...

A global, 10-yr (February 1997–April 2006), 2-hourly dataset of atmospheric precipitable water (PW) was produced from ground-based global positioning system (GPS) measurements of zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) at approximately 350 International Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) Service (IGS) ground stations. A total of 130 pairs of radiosonde and GPS stations are found within a 50-km ...

In comparisons of radiosonde vertical temperature trend profiles with comparable profiles derived from selected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) general circulation models (GCMs) driven by major external forcings of the latter part of the twentieth century, model trends exhibit a positive bias relative to radiosonde trends in the majority of cases ...

Deficiency of atmospheric water vapor profile data is one of most important problems in the flood hazard researches for areas flooding such as Goorganrood basin, because of no radiosonde stations. With the aim of radiosonde data generation retrieved radiance MODIS data, after Geometric and radiometric corrections, on 21 and 8 august 2005 from MODIS-Level 1, In order to make spatial TPW maps of ...

The global radiosonde record is the primary tool for determining climatic variations of temperature, moisture, and wind above the surface, but instrument and data processing changes have caused all long-term trends to be questioned. This paper describes initial stages of an effort to adjust radiosonde observations to a common hypothetical “reference instrument” to determine unbiased global prec...

Magnetic sensors have been added to a standard weather balloon radiosonde package to detect motion in turbulent air. These measure the terrestrial magnetic field and return data over the standard uhf radio telemetry. Variability in the magnetic sensor data is caused by motion of the instrument package. A series of radiosonde ascents carrying these sensors has been made near a Doppler lidar meas...

[1] The radio occultation (RO) sounding technique that uses signals transmitted by the Global Positioning System (GPS) has evolved as an important global observing technology. In this paper, we compare RO refractivity profiles from the CHAMP (CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload) satellite mission with those calculated from radiosonde soundings over five geographical areas, each of which uses a di...

[1] To improve our understanding of the distribution and radiative effects of water vapor, the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program has conducted a series of coordinated water vapor Intensive Observation Periods (IOPs). This study uses observations collected from four ARM IOPs to accomplish two goals: First we compare radiosonde and Raman lidar observations ...

A method to compare upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) from satellite and radiosonde data has been applied to the European radiosonde stations. The method uses microwave data as a benchmark for monitoring the performance of the stations. The present study utilizes three years (2001–2003) of data from channel 18 (183.31±1.00 GHz) of the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-B (AMSU-B) aboard the satel...