The responsible mechanism for the formation of the enhanced-V infrared cloud-top feature observed above tropopause-penetrating thunderstorms is not well understood. A new method for the combination of volumetric radar reflectivity from individual radars into three-dimensional composites with high vertical resolution (1 km) is introduced and used to test various formation mechanisms proposed in ...

Air temperature is the primary indicator of climate change. Reanalysis products are important datasets for estimates over high-elevation areas with few meteorological stations. However, they contain biases in observations, so a bias correction required to enhance accuracy modeling predictions. In this study, we used lapse-rate method correct ERA-Interim reanalysis-temperature data Qilian Mounta...

Surface incident solar radiation (Rs) is a key parameter in many climatic and ecological processes. The data from satellites and reanalysis have been widely used. However, for reanalysis, Rs data has been shown to have substantial spatial bias, and the time span of reliable satellite Rs is too short for climatic and ecological studies. Combining reanalysis and satellite data would be an effecti...

Solar radiation incident at the Earth’s surface (Rs) is an essential component of the total energy exchange between the atmosphere and the surface. Reanalysis data have been widely used, but a comprehensive validation using surface measurements is still highly needed. In this study, we evaluated the Rs estimates from six current representative global reanalyses (NCEP–NCAR, NCEP-DOE; CFSR; ERA-I...

Recent research has revealed that upwind land-use changes can significantly influence downwind precipitation. The precipitationshed (the upwind ocean and land surface that contributes evaporation to a specific location’s precipitation) may provide a boundary for coordination and governance of these upwind–downwind water linkages. We aim to quantify the variability of the precipitationshed bound...

A new microwave satellite water vapour retrieval for the polar winter atmosphere is presented. The retrieval builds on the work of Miao et al. (2001) and Melsheimer and Heygster (2008), employing auxiliary information for atmospheric conditions and numerical optimization. It was tested using simulated and actual measurements from the Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS) satellite instruments. Groun...

Sudden stratospheric warmings are prominent examples of dynamical wave–mean flow interactions in the Arctic stratosphere during Northern Hemisphere winter. They are characterized by a strong temperature increase on time scales of a few days and a strongly disturbed stratospheric vortex. This work investigates a wide class of supervised learning methods with respect to their ability to classify ...

In many hydrological models, the amount of evapotranspired water is calculated using the potential evapotranspiration (PET) approach. The main driver of several PET approaches is net radiation, whose downward components are usually obtained from meteorological input data, whereas the upward components are calculated by the model itself. Thus, uncertainties can be large due to both the input dat...

A Gaussian process emulator is applied to quantify the contributions of local and remote emissions of black carbon to its concentrations in different regions using a Latin hypercube sampling strategy for emission perturbations in the offline version of the Community Atmosphere Model Version 5.1 (CAM5) simulations. The source–receptor relationships are computed based on simulations constrained b...

Surface soil moisture is one of the operational products derived from Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) data. The reliability of its estimation depends on the detection of predominantly frozen conditions of the landscape (including soil and vegetation) and the presence of wet snow, which would otherwise impede the estimation. As the robust determination of the freeze/thaw (F/T) state using exclusi...