Validation of Results of Atmospheric Temperature and Humidity Sounding with a Fourier Infrared Spectrometer onboard the Meteor-M No. 2 Satellite

Abstract

The accuracy of retrieving the profiles of temperature and relative humidity from data of IKFS-2 Russian satellite Fourier spectrometer installed onboard the Meteor-M No. 2 satellite is assessed. The retrieved data were compared with radiosonde data and with the results of numerical weather prediction. It was found that the root-mean-square error of the vertical distribution of temperature in the air column of 1000-100 hPa as compared with radiosonde data does not exceed 2.5 K near the Earth surface and is within 2 K at the other levels. The maximum error of relative humidity retrieval was registered in the tropopause area and made up 35%. The use of water vapor mixing ratio for calculating relative humidity reduced the maximum error to ∼25% in the tropopause area and to 15% at the other levels.