Analysis Error as a Function of Observation Density for Satellite Temperature Soundings with Spatially Correlated Errors

Abstract

A simple numerical experiment demonstrates that if the errors in satellite-derived temperatures are correlated spatially, the error of an optimum interpolation objective analysis using such temperature data is increased. Moreover, increasing the density of such observations beyond a, threshold value (a spacing of about 400 km in the experiment) does not yield any significant improvement in analysis accuracy, in contrast to the cage of observations with spatially uncorrelated errors.