Surface Temperature Determination from an Amalgamation of GOES and TIROS-N Radiance Measurements

A method to depict quasi-continuous surface temperature features is presented. Half-hourly GOES window channel brightness temperature determinations are employed to monitor time changes in the surface temperature field. TIROS-N water vapor channel measurements, within 6 h of the GOES measurements, are used to generate water vapor absorption corrections to the window channel brightness temperatures. Two case studies are presented that show the resulting surface radiating temperature estimates to be accurate close to 1 K. In regions where conventional ground based measurements are sparse, this method is demonstrated to be most useful. The potential for using time sequences of these surface temperature fields as a diagnostic aid for forecasting severe weather is exhibited in one of the case studies.