Enhanced validation of satellite derived sounding products using reference and dedicated radiosondes

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Products validation System (NPROVS) has been operating at NOAA/Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) since 2008 to routinely monitor over different latitudes the performance of temperature and water vapor profiles retrieved from operational environmental satellite sensor observations against conventional upper air radiosonde observations (RAOB). The following paper presents an enhancement of this approach, NPROVS+, using routinely available reference and satellite synchronized dedicated RAOB data. Dedicated RAOB funded by the S-NPP JPSS Cal/Val program include those launched at several sites including the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, and the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) as well as series of intensive AERosols and Ocean Science Expeditions (AEROSE) field experiments. Reference RAOBs are from the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN) and include traceable uncertainty estimates of observed geophysical parameters. The use of reference and dedicated RAOBs elevates the validation and allows direct use of uncertainty estimates to help interpret satellite product performance. These data are generally independent of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models (which assimilate conventional RAOBs), typically used to validate satellite-derived products and in some cases also used to provide apriori information for the satellite products. This independence along with the reference standard provided by such data make them desirable for characterizing satellite product performance.