Determination of stratospheric temperature and height gradients from Nimbus 3 radiation data

To improve the specification of stratospheric, horizontal, temperature and geopotential height fields needed for high-flying aircraft, we derived a technique to estimate data between satellite tracks using interpolated infrared interferometer spectrometer 15-micron radiation data from Nimbus 3. The interpolation is based on the observed gradients of the medium resolution infrared 15-micron radiances between subsatellite tracks. The technique was verified with radiosonde data taken within 6 hr of the satellite data. Comparison indicates that the technique developed here produces analyses that are in general agreement with those from radiosonde data. In addition, this technique provides details over areas of sparse data not shown by conventional techniques.