ALBERT

Description: Comparisons are presented between Nimbus 7 LIMS (Limb Infrared Monitor of the Stratosphere) mapped temperatures and both Datasonde and sphere in situ rocketsonde temperature measurements. With this approach up to 666 LIMS/Datasonde pairs were obtained for various pressure levels to look for small biases in LIMS temperatures as a function of altitude, latitude and season. Between 10-1 hPa LIMS and Datasonde agree everywhere to better than +/- 2 K with the exception of a warm bias of about 3 K at 2 hPa at high latitudes. However, LIMS is colder than the Datasonde by about 4 K at 0.4 hPa and by about 8-10 K at 0.1 hPa. When compared with the more accurate sphere temperatures the bias at 0.1 hPa is reduced by nearly one-half. These results indicate that the LIMS zonal mean constituent profiles are nearly free of temperature bias, except perhaps at 0.1 hPa.

Description: Determinations of the zonally averaged and diabatically derived residual mean circulation (RMC) are particularly sensitive to the assumed zonal mean temperature distribution used as input. Several different middle atmosphere satellite temperature distributions have been employed in models and are compared here: a 4-year (late 1978 to early 1982) National Meteorological Center (NMC) climatology, the Barnett and Corney (or BC) climatology, and the 7 months of Nimbus 7 limb infrared monitor of the stratosphere (LIMS) temperatures. All three climatologies are generally accurate below the 10 hPa level, but there are systematic differences between them of up to +/-5 K in the upper stratosphere and lower mesosphere. The NMC/LIMS differences are evaluated using time series of rocketsonde and reconstructed satellite temperatures at station locations. Much of those biases can be explained by the differing vertical resolutions for the satellite-derived temperatures; the time series of reconstructed LIMS profiles have higher resolution and are more accurate. Because the LIMS temperatures are limited to just two full seasons, one cannot obtain monthly RMCs from them for an annual model calculation. Two alternate monthly climatologies are examined briefly: the 4-year Nimbus 7 stratospheric and mesospheric sounder (SAMS) temperatures and for the mesosphere the distribution from the Solar Mesosphere Explorer (SME), both of which are limb viewers of medium vertical resolution. There are also differences of the order of +/-5 K for those data sets. It is concluded that a major source of error in the determination of diabatic RMCs is a persistent pattern of temperature bias whose characteristics vary according to the vertical resolution of each individual climatology.

Description: To ensure spectral consistency when comparing Nimbus 7 Limb Infrared Monitor of the Stratosphere Experiment (LIMS) NO2 distributions with those from Atmosphere Trace Molecule Spectroscopy (ATMOS) and Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite Experiments (UARS), 1 day (May 5, 1979) of LIMS measurements were reprocessed using the NO2 line list on the HITRAN 92 tape compiled by the Airforce Geophysics Laboratory (AFGL). The revised NO2 mixing ratios are smaller by up to 20%. The decrease is not constant with height, latitude, or time of day but depends on the absolute amount of NO2 in the profile, as a result of a change in the degree of saturation for the strong NO2 spectral lines. The revised NO2 agrees better with correlative measurements and with NO2 distributions from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) and Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) satellite experiments but not with those from ATMOS 85. Profiles of the day/night ratio of revised NO2 are now larger near 5 hPa. There is also some improvement between observed and modeled ozone in the upper stratosphere, when the revised nighttime NO2 profile is used as the estimate of NO(y) for the model calculations.