Abstract
Abstract. The availability of microwave instruments on satellite platforms allows the retrieval of essential water cycle components at high quality for improved understanding and evaluation of water processes in climate modelling. HOAPS-3, the latest version of the satellite climatology "Hamburg Ocean Atmosphere Parameters and Fluxes from Satellite Data" provides fields of turbulent heat fluxes, evaporation, precipitation, freshwater flux and related atmospheric variables over the global ice-free ocean. This paper describes the content, methodology and retrievals of the HOAPS climatology. A sophisticated processing chain, including all available Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) instruments aboard the satellites of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP) and careful inter-sensor calibration, ensures a homogeneous time-series with dense data sampling and hence detailed information of the underlying weather situations. The completely reprocessed data set with a continuous time series from 1987 to 2005 contains neural network based algorithms for precipitation and wind speed and Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) based SST fields. Additionally, a new 85 GHz synthesis procedure for the defective SSM/I channels on DMSP F08 from 1988 on has been implemented. Freely available monthly and pentad means, twice daily composites and scan-based data make HOAPS-3 a versatile data set for studying ocean-atmosphere interaction on different temporal and spatial scales. HOAPS-3 data products are available via http://www.hoaps.org.
Highlights
A thorough knowledge of the global water cycle is crucially important for a detailed understanding and successful modelling of the global climate system
Several gridded data products of monthly and pentad means, twice daily composites along with scan-based data allows the use of HOAPS-3 data for studying ocean-atmosphere interaction on different temporal and spatial scales
A sophisticated processing chain has been implemented that includes the handling of Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) raw data, the retrieval of geophysical parameters, and gridding procedures
Summary
A thorough knowledge of the global water cycle is crucially important for a detailed understanding and successful modelling of the global climate system. The second version, HOAPS II (Fennig et al, 2006a,b), was available since mid 2004 It included major improvements, such as the concurrent use of all available SSM/I instruments up to December 2002 including inter-calibration and improved algorithms to derive sea surface flux parameters. That the global mean precipitation in HOAPS II was significantly lower compared to other climatologies, resulting in an implausibly large global net ocean surface freshwater flux into the atmosphere on the climatological scale This and a few other issues led to the development of the most recent version HOAPS-3 (Andersson et al, 2007a,b,c). Great care was put into instrument stability assessment and inter-sensor calibration (see Sect. 3.3)
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