A quality control method for high-resolution radiosonde temperature and wind data

This study proposes a method to derive the climatological limit thresholds that can be used in an operational/historical quality control procedure for Chinese high vertical resolution(5–10 m)radiosonde temperature and wind speed data.The whole atmosphere is divided into 64 vertical bins,and the profiles are constructed by the percentiles of the values in each vertical bin.Based on the percentile profiles(PPs),some objective criteria are developed to obtain the thresholds.Tibetan Plateau field data are used to validate the effectiveness of the method in the application of experimental data.The results show that the derived thresholds for 120 operational stations and 3 experimental stations are effective in detecting the gross errors,and those PPs can clearly and instantly illustrate the characteristics of a radiosonde variable and reveal the distribution of errors.

Empirical model for mean temperature and assessment of precipitable water vapor derived from GPS

The estimation of Precipitable Water Vapor （PWV） derived from Global Positioning System （GPS） data at the IGS site WUHN is assessed by comparing with PWV obtained from radiosonde data （No.57494） in Wuhan. The applicability of Saastamoinen （SAAS）, Hopfield and Black models used for estimating Zenith Hydrostatic Delay （ZHD） and Zenith Wet Delay （ZWD） and different models is verified in the estimation of GPS-derived PWV for the applied area. The experimental results demonstrated that ： 1 ） the precision of PWV estimated from Black model used for calculating ZHD （ ZHDs ） is lower than that of SAAS （ ZHDsAAs ） model and Hopfield model （ZHDn） with the RMS of 4. 16 ram; 2） the RMS of PWV estimated from SAAS model used for calculating ZWD （SAAS） is 3.78 ram; 3 ） the well-known Bevis model gives similar accuracy compared with the site-specific models for Tm in terms of surface temperature （ Ts ） and surface pressure （Ps）, which can reach the accuracy inside 1 mm in the GPS-derived PWV estimates.

Bias Adjustment and Analysis of Chinese Daily Historical Radiosonde Temperature Data

The discontinuities in historical Chinese radiosonde datasets are attributed to artificial errors. In order to reflect more realistically basic conditions of the atmosphere over China and provide more reasonable radiosonde data as input to climate change analysis and to atmospheric reanalysis data assimilation systems, this paper proposes a scheme to identify breakpoints and adjust biases in daily radiosonde observations. The ongoing ECMWF Re Analysis-Interim(ERA-Interim) 12-h forecasts are used as reference series in the scheme, complemented by the ECMWF Twentieth Century Reanalysis(ERA-20 C). A series of breakpoint identification schemes are developed and combined with metadata to detect breakpoints. The Quantile-Matching(QM) method is applied to test and adjust daily radiosonde data on 12 mandatory pressure levels collected at 80 sounding stations during 1979–2013. The adjusted temperatures on mandatory levels are interpolated to significant levels for temperature adjustment on these levels. The adjustment scheme not only solves the data discontinuity problem caused by changes in observational instruments and bias correction methods, but also solves the discontinuity problem in the 1200 minus 0000 UTC temperature time series on mandatory levels at individual sounding stations. Before the adjustment, obvious discontinuities can be found in the deviation field between the raw radiosonde data and ERA-Interim reanalysis with relatively large deviations before 2001. The deviation discontinuity is mainly attributed to the nationwide upgrade of the radiosonde system in China around 2001. After the adjustment, the time series of deviations becomes more continuous. In addition, compared with the adjusted temperature data on mandatory levels over 80 radiosonde stations in China contained in the Radiosonde Observation Correction Using Reanalyses(RAOBCORE) 1.5, the dataset adjusted by the method proposed in the present study exhibits higher quality than RAOBCORE 1.5, while discontinuities still exist in the time series of temperature at 0000, 1200, and 1200 minus 0000 UTC in RAOBCORE 1.5.

Increasing free-air 0℃ isotherm height in Southwest China from 1960 to 2010

Based on the radiosonde data observed at 14 stations in Southwest China from 1960 to 2010, as well as the corresponding surface air temperature, the long-term change of free-air 0℃ isotherm height in Southwest China and the relationships between surface air temperature and 0℃ isotherm height are discussed. The results indicated that the spatial distribution of 0℃ isotherm height is generally related with latitude, but the huge massif or plateau may complicate the latitude pattern. The two main regimes influencing the spatial patterns of 0℃ isotherm height in Southwest China are latitude and huge massif. The annual 0℃ isotherm height has increased by 35 m per decade in the recent decades, which is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. Generally, the increasing trend can be examined for each seasonal series, especially in winter （53 m per decade）. The diversity of trend magnitudes for annual and seasonal series can also be detected at a spatial view, but generally 0℃ isotherm height correlated well with surface air temperature.