A series of model experiments with the coupled Max-Planck-Institute ECHAM5/OM climate model have been investigated and compared with microwave measurements from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) and re-analysis data for the period 1979-2008. The evaluation is carried out by computing the Temperature in the Lower Troposphere (TLT) and Temperature in the Middle Troposphere (TMT) using the MSU wei...

[1] Tropical atmospheric temperatures in different tropospheric layers are retrieved using satellite-borne Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) observations. We find that tropospheric temperature trends in the tropics are greater than the surface warming and increase with height. Our analysis indicates that the near-zero trend from Spencer and Christy’s MSU channel-2 angular scanning retrieval for the...

Retrievals of tropospheric temperature trends from data of the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) are subject to biases related to the strong cooling of the stratosphere during the past few decades. The magnitude of this stratospheric contamination in various retrievals is estimated using stratospheric temperature trend profiles based on observations. It is found that from 1979 to 2001 the stratosph...

[1] We validate the temperature climatology recorded by the Microwave Sounding Unit with GPS occultation data collected by the GPS/MET experiment. We choose to validate only the lower stratospheric MSU climatology in order to circumvent the wet-dry ambiguity associated with GPS occultation in the midto lower troposphere. We simulate the lower stratospheric channel’s brightness temperature by co...

The University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have constructed long-term temperature records for deep atmospheric layers using satellite Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) observations. However, these groups disagree on the magnitude of global temperature trends s...

[1] Multidecadal-scale changes in atmospheric temperature have been measured by both radiosondes and the satellite-borne microwave sounding unit (MSU). Both measurement systems exhibit substantial time varying biases that need to removed to the extent possible from the raw data before they can be used to assess climate trends. A number of methods have been developed for each measurement system,...

NOAA/NESDIS/Center for Satellite Applications and Research has been reprocessing and recalibrating the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) observations to generate atmospheric temperature dataset with climate quality. So far, observations from the MSU channels 2, 3, and 4 for NOAA 10, 11, 12, and 14 have been recalibrated using a recently-developed SNO (simultaneously nadir overpasses) sequential non...

Climatological time-series of tropospheric temperatures from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) are potentially of great value in validating observations of climate change due to their excellent spatial and temporal coverage. However, the long-term trend signal is small relative to natural seasonal and inter-annual variability and inter-satellite biases, and is comparable to diurnal temperature ...

[1] The Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) aboard the NOAA series of polar orbiting satellites has been used by three groups to monitor the very small trend in the global tropospheric temperature over the 25-year satellite record. To obtain a homogeneous data set, each group made different calibration corrections of the MSUs in the form of fixed biases, and in some cases temperature-dependent adjus...