Retrieving Atmospheric Temperature Profiles from AMSU-A Data with Neural Networks

Back propagation neural networks are used to retrieve atmospheric temperature profiles from NOAA-16 Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A) measurements over East Asia. The collocated radiosonde observation and AMSU-A data over land in 2002-2003 are used to train the network, and the data over land in 2004 are used to test the network. A comparison with the multi-linear regression method shows that the neural network retrieval method can significantly improve the results in all weather conditions.When an offset of 0.5 K or a noise level of 0.2 K is added to all channels simultaneously, the increase in the overall root mean square (RMS) error is less than 0.1 K. Furthermore, an experiment is conducted to investigate the effects of the window channels on the retrieval. The results indicate that the brightness temperatures of window channels can provide significantly useful information on the temperature retrieval near the surface. Additionally, the RMS errors of the profiles retrieved with the trained neural network are compared with the errors from the International Advanced TOVS (ATOVS) Processing Package (IAPP).It is shown that the network-based algorithm can provide much better results in the experiment region and comparable results in other regions. It is also noted that the network can yield remarkably better results than IAPP at the low levels and at about the 250-hPa level in summer skies over ocean. Finally,the network-based retrieval algorithm developed herein is applied in retrieving the temperature anomalies of Typhoon Rananim from AMSU-A data.