| vs others https://noaahrd.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/paper-on-the-accuracy-of-an-experimental-airborne-instrument-to-measure-temperature-and-humidity-released-online-in-atmospheric-and-oceanic-technology/ Important Conclusions: Model and dropsonde errors are about the same size. Temperature and specific humidity (the amount of water vapor in a kg of air) errors are less than 0.8 K and 1.0 g kg-1, respectively. The HAMSR instrument error is larger than that from the other data sets. The error varies between 1.5 and 2.0 K and 1.5 and 2.5 g kg-1 for temperature and specific humidity, respectively. The larger errors of HAMSR are likely due to providing very few observations below the aircraft compared to dropsondes and to itsz indirectly (remotely) observing the atmosphere from the aircraft; dropsondes measure directly where they are located as they fall to the surface. The results confirm the high accuracy of the dropsondes released from the Global Hawk. https://twitter.com/HRD_AOML_NOAA/status/1354924554695663619 https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/aop/JTECH-D-20-0044.1/JTECH-D-20-0044.1.xml Abstract This study estimates the random error variances and standard deviations (STDs) for four data sets: Global Hawk (GH) dropsondes (DROP), the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR) aboard the GH, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis, and the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model, using the three-cornered hat (3CH) method. These estimates are made during the 2016 Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) season in the environment of four tropical cyclones from August to October. For temperature and specific and relative humidity, the ERA5, HWRF, and DROP data sets all have similar magnitudes of errors, with ERA5 having the smallest. The error STDs of temperature and specific humidity are less than 0.8 K and 1.0 g kg-1 over most of the troposphere, while relative humidity error STDs increase from less than 5% near the surface to between 10 and 20% in the upper troposphere. The HAMSR bias-corrected data have larger errors, with estimated error STDs of temperature and specific humidity in the lower troposphere between 1.5 and 2.0 K and 1.5 and 2.5 g kg-1. HAMSR's relative humidity error STD increases from approximately 10% in the lower troposphere to 30% in the upper troposphere. The 3CH method error estimates are generally consistent with prior independent estimates of errors and uncertainties for the HAMSR and dropsonde data sets, although they are somewhat larger, likely due to the inclusion of representativeness errors (differences associated with different spatial and temporal scales represented by the data). |