Improvements to TOVS retrievals over sea ice and applications to estimating Arctic energy fluxes

Although TOVS has flown continuously on polar-orbiting satellites since 1978, its potential has not been realized in high latitudes because the quality of retrievals is often significantly lower over sea ice and snow than over other surfaces. The recent availability of three Arctic data sets has provided an opportunity to validate TOVS retrievals. Comparisons with these data reveal deficiencies in TOVS retrievals over sea ice during the cold season; e.g., ice surface temperature is often 5 to 15 K too warm, microwave emissivity is approximately 15% too low at large view angles, clear/cloudy scenes are sometimes misidentified, and low-level inversions are often not captured. In this study, methods to reduce these errors are investigated. -Author