HR: 08:00h
AN: H31I-01 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: Observation of the water cycle from space with the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS)
AU: * Chahine, M T
EM: moustafa.t.chahine@jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, United States
AU: Waliser, D E
EM: duane.e.waliser@jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, United States
AU: Fetzer, E J
EM: eric.j.fetzer@jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, United States
AU: Olsen, E T
EM: edward.t.olsen@jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, United States
AB: AIRS is one of six instruments on board the Aqua satellite, part of NASA's Earth Observing System launched in a sun synchronous near polar orbit on May 4, 2002. AIRS and its partner microwave instrument, AMSU A, provide high quality data facilitating studies of the global water and energy cycles, climate variation and trends, and the response of the climate system to increased greenhouse gases. The exceptional stability of the AIRS instrument provides a climate record of thermal infrared radiance spectra spanning the 3.74 15.4 mm spectral band with 2378 channels at a nominal resolution of 1/1200. (Chahine et al, in BAMS, July 2006) Accurate knowledge of the vertical distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere is critically important to the determination of the warming the Earth will experience as a result of anthropogenic forcing. Comparison of the AIRS specific humidity product to state of the art climate models has shown most models exhibit a pattern of drier than observed (by 10 25%) in the tropics below 800 hPa and moister than observed (by 25 100%) between 300 and 600 hPa in the extra tropics (Pierce et al, GRL 2006). The AIRS water vapor measurements also reveal tropospheric moisture perturbations that are much larger than those depicted in previous NCAR/NCEP reanalysis and ECMWF analysis datasets, both of which have been widely used as observations to validate models. This suggests that the impact of convection induced downdrafts on the atmospheric boundary layer is significantly underestimated in both ECMWF and NCEP reanalysis (Fu et al., GRL 2006). AIRS data have led to the discovery of significant differences in the lower troposphere moisture and temperature fields during the spatial temporal evolution of the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO). The anomalous lower troposphere temperature structure is observed in detail by AIRS for the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, while it remains much less well defined in the NCEP temperature fields (Tian et al,GRL 2007). Information about the AIRS mission, products and research may be found at the AIRS Project web site: http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov. AIRS data products are freely accessible world wide at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) web site for AIRS support: http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/AIRS/.
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 3333 Model calibration (1846)
DE: 3337 Global climate models (1626, 4928)
DE: 3360 Remote sensing
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting