Signatures of Annual and Seasonal Variations of CO2 and Other Greenhouse Gases from Comparisons between NOAA TOVS Observations and Radiation Model Simulations

Abstract

Since 1979, sensors on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) series of polar meteorological satellites have provided continuous measurements of the earth's surface and atmosphere. One of these sensors, the Television Infrared Observational Satellite (TIROS-N) Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS), observes earth-emitted radiation in the infrared?with the High-Resolution Infrared Sounder (HIRS)?and in the microwave?with the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU)?portions of the spectrum. The NOAA and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Pathfinder program was designed to make these data more readily accessible to the community in the form of processed geophysical variables (temperature, water vapor, cloud characteristics, and so on) through the ?interpretation? of the infrared and microwave radiances. All presently developed interpretation algorithms more or less directly rely on the comparison between a set of observed and a set of simulated radiances. For that reason, the accuracy of the simulation directly influences that of the interpretation of radiances in terms of thermodynamic variables. Comparing simulations to observations is the key to a better knowledge of the main sources of errors affecting either the former or the latter. Instrumental radiometric problems, radiosonde, surface data, and forward radiative transfer model limitations as well as difficulties raised by differences in space and in time of satellite and radiosonde observations (collocations) have long been studied in detail. Less attention has been paid to errors, presumed negligible, generated by the absence of consideration of main absorbing gases (CO2, N2O, CO, O3, and so on) atmospheric seasonal cycles and/or annual trends. In this paper, all important sources of variability of the observations and of the simulations are first reviewed. Then it is shown that analyzing, at different timescales (seasonal, annual), the departures between simulated and observed NOAA TOVS brightness temperatures reveals signatures of these greenhouse gases' concentration variations. Not only the shape of the seasonal variations (locations of the peaks) is in good agreement with what is presently known, but also their amplitude (peak-to-peak) matches relatively well the values predicted from a line-by-line radiative transfer model. Moreover, annual trends correspond very well with the known increase in concentration of gases such as CO2 or N2O, as a result of human activities. Limits of such an analysis are discussed: the most significant one finds its origin in the modest spectral resolution of the TOVS channels that integrate signatures from several absorbers and from many atmospheric layers. However, results from this work leave some hope to extract from these channels interesting information on CO2, N2O, and CO distributions. These results also strengthen the hope to improve greatly the knowledge of the global distribution of a variety of radiatively active gases with the coming second generation of vertical sounders such as NASA's Advanced Infrared Radiation Sounder (AIRS) or the CNES/Eumetsat Infrared Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer (IASI), both characterized by a much higher spectral resolution.