Validation of Results of Atmospheric Temperature and Humidity Sounding with a Fourier Infrared Spectrometer onboard the Meteor-M No. 2 Satellite

A. A. Filei, A. N. Davidenko, Yu. V. Kiseleva, D. A. Kozlov,
and E. I. Kholodov

The accuracy of retrieving the profiles of temperature and relative humidity from data of IKFS-2 Russian satellite Fourier spectrometer installed onboard the Meteor-M No. 2 satellite is assessed. The retrieved data were compared with radiosonde data and with the results of numerical weather prediction. It was found that the root-mean-square error of the vertical distribution of temperature in the air column of 1000–100 hPa as compared with radiosonde data does not exceed 2.5 K near the Earth surface and is within 2 K at the other levels. The maximum error of relative humidity retrieval was registered in the tropopause area and made up 35%. The use of water vapor mixing ratio for calculating relative humidity reduced the maximum error to ~25% in the tropopause area and to 15% at the other levels.