Introduction to Suomi national polar-orbiting partnership advanced technology microwave sounder for numerical weather prediction and tropical cyclone applications

The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite was successfully launched on 28 October 2011. On board the Suomi NPP, the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) is a cross-track scanning instrument and has 22 channels at frequencies ranging from 23 to 183 GHz which allows for probing the atmospheric temperature and moisture under clear and cloudy conditions. ATMS inherited most of the sounding channels from its predecessors: Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A) and Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS) onboard NOAA and MetOp satellites. However, ATMS has a wider scan swath and has no gaps between two consecutive orbits. It includes one new temperature sounding channel and two water vapor sounding channels and provides more details of thermal structures in lower troposphere, especially for the storm conditions such as tropical cyclones. While ATMS temperature sounding channels have shorter integration time and therefore higher noise than AMSU-A, the ATMS observations from their overlapping field of views are resampled to produce AMSU-A-like measurements.