Enhancement of Remotely Sensed Temperature Fields by Wind Observations from a VHF Radar Network

Abstract

Ground-based remote sensing devices have recently been developed which provide high-resolution tropospheric wind measurements and coarse-resolution radiometric temperature measurements under most weather conditions. A variational analysis scheme for inferring missing details in the three-dimensional temperature field from concurrent wind observations is proposed. The scheme is based on the solution of a three-dimensional boundary value problem and thus requires input from a network of profilers, rather than one individual instrument. Since observing networks of this kind do not presently exist, the scheme is tested on objectively analyzed, thermally degraded radiosonde data. The ultimate purpose of the thermal enhancement procedure is to improve the dynamic balance between mass and wind fields observed by future ground- or space-based profiler networks and to lessen the initialization shock if these data are used in numerical prediction models.