Atmospheric Temperature Climate Data Records from Satellite Microwave Sounders - Satellite-based Applications on Climate Change - page 120

merged MSU and AMSU observations. Many instrument calibration and sampling
errors have been removed or minimized in the TCDR. These FCDR and TCDR are
expected to benefit many climate change monitoring and research areas including
data assimilation of the FCDR in modeling reanalysis development, consistent
satellite retrievals from FCDR, use of TCDR in climate trend detection, and
validations of climate model simulations. Good impacts of the recalibrated MSU
FCDR on reanalysis bias corrections have already been achieved in the NCEP
CFSR and NASA MERRA reanalysis systems. It is expected that future reanalyses
will benefit more from assimilating the SNO-recalibrated AMSU-A data.
The FCDRs and TCDRs are publicly available from the NESDIS/STAR website
with the URL address: http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/mscat/mscatmain.
htm . At the time of this writing, the SNO-recalibrated radiance FCDRs for MSU
channels 2, 3, and 4 onboard TIROS-N through NOAA-14 and AMSU-A channels
4-14 onboard NOAA-15 through NOAA-18 and MetOp-A are available for
downloading through the website. In addition, global MSU-only TCDRs for TMT,
TTS, and TLS from 1979 to 2006 and merged MSU/AMSU TCDRs from 1979 to the
present for these same variables are both available through the website. These are
gridded datasets with 2.5 latitude by 2.5 longitude resolution. Both monthly and
pentad data are provided for seamless climate change monitoring.
References
Cao C, Weinreb M, Xu H (2004) Predicting simultaneous nadir overpasses among polar-orbiting
meteorological satellites for the intersatellite calibration of radiometers. J Atmos Ocean
Technol 21:537-542
Christy JR, Spencer RW, Lobel ES (1998) Analysis of the merging procedure for the MSU daily
temperature time series. J Climate 11:2016-2041
Christy JR, Spencer RW, Braswell WD (2000) MSU tropospheric temperatures: data set construc-
tion and radiosonde comparisons. J Atmos Ocean Technol 17:1153-1170
Christy JR, Spencer RW, Norris WB, Braswell WD (2003) Error estimates of version 5.0 of MSU-
AMSU bulk atmospheric temperature. J Atmos Ocean Technol 20:613-629
Dee D, Uppala S (2009) Variational bias correction of satellite radiance data in the ERA-interim
reanalysis. Q J R Meteorol Soc 135:1830-1841. doi: 10.1002/qj.493
Fu Q, Johanson CM (2004) Stratospheric influence on MSU-derived tropospheric temperature
trends: a direct error analysis. J Climate 17:4636-4640
Fu Q, Johanson CM (2005) Satellite-derived vertical dependence of tropical tropospheric temper-
ature trends. Geophys Res Lett 32:L10703. doi: 10.1029/2004GL022266
Fu Q, Johanson CM, Warren SG, Seidel DJ (2004) Contribution of stratospheric cooling to
satellite-inferred tropospheric trends. Nature 429:55-58
Goldberg MD, Crosby DS, Zhou L (2001) The limb adjustment of AMSU-A observations:
methodology and validation. J Appl Meteor 40:70-83
Goodrum G (ed) (2000) NOAA KLM user's guide. http://www2.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/klm/cover.
htm . Amended 5 Apr 2004
Grody NC, Vinnikov KY, Goldberg MD, Sullivan J, Tarpley JD (2004) Calibration of
multisatellite observations for climate studies: microwave sounding unit (MSU). J Geophys
Res 109. doi: 10.1029/2004JD005079