Improvements and Applications of Atmospheric Soundings from Geostationary Platform

A unique feature of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Sounder over the polar orbiting sounders is that it observes the atmosphere and the surface on an hourly basis with a nominal spatial resolution of 10 km. The temporally and spatially dense observations are of great importance for improving short-term weather forecasting or nowcasting. To further demonstrate how the GOES clear-sky sounding products can help nowcasting, an improved clear-sky physical retrieval algorithm for atmospheric temperature and moisture is developed. The use of the GOES Sounder is usually limited to clear skies to avoid cloud contamination of the derived profiles. However, the chance for a GOES Sounder field-of-view (FOV) to be clear is only about 34 %. Until the advent of a microwave sounder in geostationary orbit, the search for viable soundings in cloudy conditions will continue. This thesis extends the sounding retrievals from clear sky to cloudy regions, by developing a synthetic regression-based cloudy sounding retrieval algorithm. A comparison with the microwave radiometer measured total precipitable water (TPW) at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) site from June 2003 to May 2005 shows that the clear sky TPW retrievals are improved by 0.4 mm over the legacy GOES Sounder TPW product. Comparisons against radiosondes at SGP CART site from August 2006 to May 2007 and the conventional radiosonde network over the Continental United States (CONUS) from January 2007 to November 2008 both show