Publications

Chang, L; Guo, LX; Feng, GP; Wu, XR; Gao, GP; Zhang, Y; Zhang, Y (2018). Comparison of the Arctic upper-air temperatures from radiosonde and radio occultation observations. ACTA OCEANOLOGICA SINICA, 37(1), 30-39.

Abstract
The air temperature is one of the most important parameters used for monitoring the Arctic climate change. The constellation observing system for meteorology, ionosphere, and climate and Formosa Satellite Mission 3 (COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3) radio occultation (RO) "wet" temperature product (i.e., "wetPrf") is used to analyze the Arctic air temperature profiles at 925-200 hPa in 2007-2012. The "wet" temperatures are further compared with radiosonde (RS) observations. The results from the spatially and temporally synchronized RS and COSMIC observations show that their temperatures agree well with each other, especially at 400 hPa. Comparisons of seasonal temperatures and anomalies from the COSMIC and homogenized RS observations suggest that the limited number of COSMIC observations during the spatial matchup may be insufficient to describe the smallscale spatial structure of temperature variations. Furthermore, comparisons of the seasonal temperature anomalies from the RS and 5A degrees x5A degrees gridded COSMIC observations at 400 hPa during the sea ice minimum (SIM) of 2007 and 2012 are also made. The results reveal that similar Arctic temperature variation patterns can be obtained from both RS and COSMIC observations over the land area, while extra information can be further provided from the densely distributed COSMIC observations. Therefore, despite COSMIC observations being unsuitable to describe the Arctic temperatures in the lowest level, they provide a complementary data source to study the Arctic upper-air temperature variations and related climate change.

DOI:
10.1007/s13131-018-1156-x

ISSN:
0253-505X