Seasonal Planetary Boundary Layer Height Climatology from GPS Radio Occultation

Seasonal averages of global planetary boundary layer height derived from GPS radio occultation measurements by the COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 and TerraSAR-X satellite constellations. The GES DISC organization produced this climatology product, which covers data from June 2006 to December 2015.

Use Cases

• Analyze seasonal patterns in PBL height using the binned latitude/longitude mean values.
• Assess spatial variability of boundary layer depth by mapping the 2-degree gridded PBL height data.
• Validate atmospheric model outputs by comparing simulated PBL heights against the climatology's mean and standard deviation fields.
• Study coastal atmospheric processes, noting the dataset's caveat regarding occultations with tangent points near coasts.

Strengths

• Data spans over 9 years from June 2006 to December 2015.
• Global coverage provided by a six-satellite constellation and an additional satellite.
• Vertical resolution of the source refractivity profiles is about 200 meters.
• PBL heights are binned into a consistent 2-degree by 2-degree latitude/longitude grid.

Limitations

• This is version 1, which has been superseded by a newer version.
• The dataset is temporally stale, with the last update in December 2015.
• Occultations near coasts represent an along-path horizontal averaging of approximately 100 km over both land and ocean, requiring careful interpretation.

Provenance

Source

GES_DISC, using data from the COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 and TerraSAR-X satellite missions.

Collection Method

PBL height calculated as the minimum vertical gradient of refractivity (dN/dz) from GPS radio occultation profiles, then binned and averaged into a seasonal climatology.

Time Range

June 2006 to December 2015

Freshness

Data collection ended in December 2015; the dataset is not updated.

Geography

Global