Remote Sensing of Tropical Cyclone Thermal Structure from Satellite Microwave Sounding Instruments: Impacts of Background Profiles on Retrievals

A variational retrieval system often requires background atmospheric profiles and surface parameters in its minimization process. This study investigates the impacts of specific background profiles on retrievals of tropical cyclone(TC) thermal structure. In our Microwave Retrieval Testbed(MRT), the K-means clustering algorithm is utilized to generate a set of mean temperature and water vapor profiles according to stratiform and convective precipitation in hurricane conditions. The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder(ATMS) observations are then used to select the profiles according to cloud type. It is shown that the cloud-based background profiles result in better hurricane thermal structures retrieved from ATMS observations. Compared to the Global Positioning System(GPS) dropsonde observations, the temperature and specific humidity errors in the TC inner region are less than 3 K and 2.5 g kg^(–1), respectively, which are significantly smaller than the retrievals without using the cloud-based profiles. Further experiments show that all the ATMS observations could retrieve well both temperature and humidity structures, especially within the inner core region. Thus, both temperature and humidity profiles derived from microwave sounding instruments in hurricane conditions can be reliably used for evaluation of the storm intensity with a high fidelity.

Remote Sensing of Tropical Cyclone Thermal Structure from Satellite Microwave Sounding Instruments:Impacts of Optimal Channel Selection on Retrievals

Accurate information on atmospheric temperature of tropical cyclones （TCs） is important for monitoring and pre- diction of their developments and evolution. For hurricanes, temperature anomaly in the upper troposphere can be de-rived from Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit （AMSU） and Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder （ATMS） through either regression-based or variational retrieval algorithms. This study investigates the dependency of TC warm core structure on emission and scattering processes in the forward operator used for radiance computations in temperature retrievals. In particular, the precipitation scattering at ATMS high-frequency channels can significantly change the retrieval outcomes. The simulation results in this study reveal that the brightness temperatures at 183 GHz could be depressed by 30-50 K under cloud ice water path of 1.5 mm, and thus, the temperature structure in hur-ricane atmosphere could be distorted if the ice cloud scattering was inaccurately characterized in the retrieval system. It is found that for Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Harvey that occurred in 2017, their warm core anomalies retrieved from ATMS temperature sounding channels 4 15 were more reasonable and realistic, compared with the retrievals from all other channel combinations and earlier hurricane simulation results.