The SPARC Intercomparison of Middle-Atmosphere Climatologies
By William J. Randel, P. Udelhofen, E. Fleming, M. Geller, M. Gelman, K. Hamilton, D. Karoly, D. Ortland, Steven Pawson, Richard Swinbank and 8 more. Journal of Climate, 2004
278 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An updated assessment of uncertainties in ‘‘observed’’ climatological winds and temperatures in the middle atmosphere (over altitudes ;10‐80 km) is provided by detailed intercomparisons of contemporary and historic datasets. These datasets include global meteorological analyses and assimilations, climatologies derived from research satellite measurements, historical reference atmosphere circulation statistics, rocketsonde wind and temperature data, and lidar temperature measurements. The comparisons focus on a few basic circulation statistics (temperatures and zonal winds), with special attention given to tropical variability. Notable differences are found between analyses for temperatures near the tropical tropopause and polar lower stratosphere, temperatures near the global stratopause, and zonal winds throughout the Tropics. Comparisons of historical reference atmosphere and rocketsonde temperatures with more recent global analyses show the influence of decadal-scale cooling of the stratosphere and mesosphere. Detailed comparisons of the tropical semiannual oscillation (SAO) and quasibiennial oscillation (QBO) show large differences in amplitude between analyses; recent data assimilation schemes show the best agreement with equatorial radiosonde, rocket, and satellite data.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2090546069c4a7b87bf3e256e866389d48bcf65
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Transport in the Middle Atmosphere (2007, background): “However the amplitude (and to a lesser extent the shape) of the seasonal cycle varies from year to year, as the wave forcing varies (Fusco and Salby 1999; Randel et al. 2002).”
- Simulation of secular trends in the middle atmosphere, 1950–2003 (2007, background): “…adiabatic effect of downwelling and upwelling associated with the QBO secondary circulation) [Plumb and Bell, 1982; Giorgetta and Bengtsson, 1999; Randel et al., 2004b]; volcanic eruptions (which heat the tropopause region when solar radiation is absorbed by volcanic aerosols) [Stenchikov et…”
- Improved Middle Atmosphere Climate and Forecasts in the ECMWF Model through a Nonorographic Gravity Wave Drag Parameterization (2010, unknown): “…than 3% to the total Cy35r3 run time. c. Validating data The simulated results are compared to observations comprising the Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate (SPARC) climatology (Randel et al. 2004) and ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA)-Interim (ERAI, which is the latest ECMWF reanalysis).”
- SAGE II measurements of stratospheric aerosol properties at non-volcanic levels (2007, background): “Randel et al. (2004) has reported that the NCEP tropopause temperature is too warm by approximately 2–3 K with the potential for larger errors at 10 mb.”
- Multimodel climate and variability of the stratosphere (2011, unknown): “ERA‐40 and NCEP data from 1980 to 1999 and on the Randel et al. [2004] climatology that represents the time period 1992–1997.”
- ERA‐20CM: a twentieth‐century atmospheric model ensemble (2015, result): “(2011) the QBO was shown to fit closely the winds from radiosondes and compared well with independent rocketsonde data (Randel et al., 2004).”