Articles | Volume 19, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3733-2019
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3733-2019
Research article
 | 
22 Mar 2019
Research article |  | 22 Mar 2019

On the interpretation of upper-tropospheric humidity based on a second-order retrieval from infrared radiances

Klaus Gierens and Kostas Eleftheratos

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Cited articles

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Chung, E.-S., Soden, B., Huang, X., Shi, L., and John, V.: An assessment of the consistency between satellite measurements of upper tropospheric water vapor, J. Geophys. Res., 121, 2874–2887, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JD024496, 2016. a
Eleftheratos, K., Zerefos, C., Zanis, P., Balis, D., Tselioudis, G., Gierens, K., and Sausen, R.: A study on natural and manmade global interannual fluctuations of cirrus cloud cover for the period 184–2004, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 7, 2631–2642, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-7-2631-2007, 2007. a
Gettelman, A., Fetzer, E., Elderling, A., and Irion, F.: The global distribution of supersaturation in the upper troposphere from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, J. Climate, 19, 6089–6103, 2006. a
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We derive a new method to retrieve upper-tropospheric humidity (UTH) from High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder (HIRS) channel 12 brightness temperatures. With the new method we solve an old problem, namely that the wavelength change that occurred between HIRS 2 on NOAA 14 and HIRS 3 on NOAA 15 led to the retrieval of many more events with high UTH; that is, the time series shows strong jumps at high UTH values. This old problem is solved with the new retrieval.
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