An improved atmospheric profile retrieval system for GOES sounder and SEVIRI data

Abstract

An improved atmospheric profile retrieval system for the current Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Sounder data process has been developed. This algorithm can also be applied to process Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the next generation GOES-R to continue the current GOES class Sounder legacy products. The Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) data from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite is employed as proxy to test and evaluate the algorithm for ABI legacy product. Since there is only a few sounding spectral bands in SEVIRI, a first guess from forecast is needed in legacy profile retrieval. The results show that if a set of temperature/humidity profiles from weather forecast is applied as first guess, the accuracy of temperature/humidity profiles can be achieved with that from the current GOES Sounder. Considering that there is only one temperaturesensitive spectral band in SEVIRI, temperature information is limited; however, the improvement on humidity profile retrieval over forecast is noticeable because there are two water vapor absorption spectral bands in SEVIRI. The results of total precitable water (TPW) and lift index (LI) from combined SEVIRI and forecast are presented as well.