Vertical resolution study on the GOES-R Hyperspectral Environmental Suite (HES)

Abstract

High spectral resolution infrared radiances from the Hyperspectral Environmental Suite (HES) on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R and beyond) will allow for monitoring the evolution of atmospheric temperature and moisture vertical distributions. HES, together with the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), will operationally provide enhanced spatial, temporal and vertical information for radiances and atmospheric soundings that are desired by numerical weather forecast models. An algorithm has been developed to analyze the retrieval error and the vertical resolution of soundings from HES radiances. Trade-off studies have been done to balance the spectral coverage, spectral resolution, and signal-to-noise ratio in order to achieve the GOES users' requirement of 1 K accuracy with 1km vertical resolution for temperature and 10% accuracy with 2km vertical resolution for relative humidity. The vertical resolution capability of HES is also compared with that of the current GOES Sounder which has 18 infrared spectral channels and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) on the NOAA polar orbiting satellites that has good temperature sensitivity in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere. The advantage of combination of GOES sounder and AMSU is also investigated.