Evaluating the Accuracy of Jason-3 Water Vapor Product Using PWV Data
from Global Radiosonde and GNSS Stations
Abstract
Abstract: Jason-3 is equipped with an Advanced Microwave Radiometer
(AMR) to remove the signal wet delay caused by precipitable water vapor
(PWV). In order to investigate the accuracy of PWV from Jason-3 AMR on a
global scale, we adopt PWV observations from 263 radiosonde stations and
103 GNSS stations as reference PWV. These reference PWV are recorded
during Jason-3 cycles 0 – 119 and are globally distributed in coastal
and island regions. Over 60,000 Jason-3 PWV vs radiosonde PWV comparison
points and over 380,000 Jason-3 PWV vs GNSS PWV comparison points are
used in this study. For GNSS PWV, four retrieval strategies are used to
retrieve GNSS PWV: a combination of two different zenith hydrostatic
delay (ZHD) modeling methods (Saastamoinen and ECMWF), and two PWV
height reduction methods (Kouba empirical method and ECMWF method to
reduce PWV from height of station to sea level). The comparison results
indicate that the root mean square error (RMSE) of Jason-3 PWV evaluated
using radiosonde PWV is 3.4 kg/m, while the RMSE evaluated with PWV from
four different GNSS schemes are in the range of 3.0 – 3.5 kg/m.
Specifically, Jason-3 PWV has the best agreement (3.0 kg/mof RMSE) with
GNSS PWV derived using Saastamoinen ZHD correction and ECMWF PWV height
correction. In addition, the accuracy of Jason-3 PWV increases when the
latitude of its footprints or the distance from its footprints to land
increases. The correlation coefficient of Jason-3 PWV with radiosonde
and GNSS PWV are 0.984 and 0.988, respectively.