New NOAA-15 Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) Datasets for Stratospheric Research

The NOAA-15 spacecraft launched in May 1998 carried the first Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU). The AMSU has eleven oxygen absorption channels with weighting functions peaking from near the surface to 2 mb. Twice-daily, limb-corrected I degree gridded datasets of layer temperatures have been constructed since the AMSU went operational in early August 1998. Examples of AMSU imagery will be shown, as will preliminary analyses of daily fluctuations in tropical stratospheric temperatures and their relationship to daily variations in tropical-average rainfall measured by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I). The AMSU datasets are now available for other researchers to utilize.