Monitoring Satellite Radiance Biases Using NWP Models

Radiances measured by satellite radiometers are often subject to biases due to limitations in their radiometric calibration. In support of the Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System project, to improve the quality of calibrated radiances from atmospheric sounders and imaging radiometers, an activity is underway to compare routinely measured radiances with those simulated from operational global numerical weather prediction (NWP) fields. This paper describes the results obtained from the first three years of these comparisons. Data from the High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder, Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer, Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit, and Microwave Humidity Sounder radiometers, together with the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, a spectrometer, and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer, an interferometer, were included in the analysis. Changes in mean biases and their standard deviations were used to investigate the temporal stability of the bias and radiometric noise of the instruments. A double difference technique can be employed to remove the effect of changes or deficiencies in the NWP model which can contribute to the biases. The variation of the biases with other variables is also investigated, such as scene temperature, scan angle, location, and time of day. Many of the instruments were shown to be stable in time, with a few exceptions, but measurements from the same instrument on different platforms are often biased with respect to each other. The limitations of the polar simultaneous nadir overpasses often used to monitor biases between polar-orbiting sensors are shown with these results due to the apparent strong dependence of some radiance biases on scene temperature.