Enhanced soundings over oceans from NOAA-9 polar orbiting satellite

Global temperature soundings have been produced by NOAA at 250 Km resolution utilizing the data from HIRS/2, MSU, and SSU instruments aboard NOAA polar orbiting satellites. This 250 Km resolution is too coarse to provide enough information in meteorologically active regions such as frontal systems. An Enhanced sounding system has been developed to produce soundings at a much higher resolution (approximately 100 Km) and has been tested in a near real-time operational environment. Test results and case studies over ocean areas are presented and compared with TOVS data, NMC analyses and oceanic radiosonde data where available. The results have depicted the small scale meteorological features quite well. The high resolution soundings provide the increased horizontal gradient information useful for numerical weather prediction models especially in data sparse regions such as the world oceans.