Upper-Tropospheric Winds Derived from Geostationary Satellite Water Vapor Observations

Abstract

The coverage and quality of remotely sensed upper-tropospheric moisture parameters have improved considerably with the deployment of a new generation of operational geostationary meteorological satellites: GOES-8/9 and GMS-5. The GOES-8/9 water vapor imaging capabilities have increased as a result of improved radiometric sensitivity and higher spatial resolution. The addition of a water vapor sensing channel on the latest GMS permits nearly global viewing of upper-tropospheric water vapor (when joined with GOES and Meteosat) and enhances the commonality of geostationary meteorological satellite observing capabilities. Upper-tropospheric motions derived from sequential water vapor imagery provided by these satellites can be objectively extracted by automated techniques. Wind fields can be deduced in both cloudy and cloud-free environments. In addition to the spatially coherent nature of these vector fields, the GOES-8/9 multispectral water vapor sensing capabilities allow for determination of wind fields over multiple tropospheric layers in cloud-free environments. This article provides an update on the latest efforts to extract water vapor motion displacements over meteorological scales ranging from subsynoptic to global. The potential applications of these data to impact operations, numerical assimilation and prediction, and research studies are discussed.

A novel approach for the extraction of cloud motion vectors using airglow imager measurements

“…While the large target window allows other unwanted noisy structures enter into the search domain, too small window increases false alarms (Bresky et al, 2012). Conventionally, wind guess (WG) information supplements this exercise and to set the coordinates of smaller windows in the latter image before matching (Velden et al, 1997;Bedka and Mecikalski, 2005;Bresky et al, 2012). In the present study, the horizontal wind climatology discussed in Sect.…”

“…The retrieval techniques improved from a simple cross correlation analysis in the beginning (Izawa and Fujita, 1969;Leese et al, 1971;Hubert and Whitney, 1971) to those involving very advanced photogrammetry and satellite imagery analysis in recent times for obtaining CMVs with higher precision (Schmetz et al, 1993;Velden et al, 1997;Kishtawal et al, 2009;Deb et al, 2015;Kaur et al, 2014 and references therein). First level unrefined knowledge about a cloud element can be obtained from the cloud top temperatures, retrieved by Thermal infrared (IR) channel.…”

moderate resolution imaging spectrometer

“…The methods used for generating cloud and water vapour based polar AMVs using MODIS observations from the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites (Key et al 2003(Key et al , 2004Daniels et al 2004) are similar to those used with sequential infrared and water vapour band observations from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) Velden et al 1997;Le Marshall et al 2003). To generate the winds used here, infrared (11 µm) and water vapour (6.7 µm) band imagery from three sequential polar Aust.…”

Combining Meteosat-10 satellite image data with GPS tropospheric path delays to estimate regional integrated water vapor (IWV) distribution

“…It repetitively cycles through evaporation and condensation phases, transporting heat energy around the Earth and between the surface and the atmosphere (Solomon et al, 2010). WV in the atmosphere allows short wavelength radiation from the sun to propagate through the atmosphere, but it traps the long wavelength radiation emitted by the Earth's surface (van Vleck, 1947). This trapped radiation causes temperatures to increase.…”

“…The most common ones utilize radiosondes (Kley et al, 2000;Soden et al, 2004;Miloshevich et al, 2006), different techniques of GPS meteorology (Bevis et al, 1992(Bevis et al, , 1994Duan et al, 1996;Ware and Alber, 1997;Hagemann and Bengtsson, 2003;Vedel et al, 2004;Heise et al, 2009;Guerova et al, 2013;Hordyniec et al, 2015) or measurements from remote sensing satellites (Velden et al, 1997;Cresswell et al, 1999;Jiang et al, 2012). Radiosondes offer an essential component of the global observing system due to their extended lifetime and broad geographic coverage (Kley et al, 2000).…”