Use of radio occultation for long‐term tropopause studies: Uncertainties, biases, and instabilities

Research suggests that changes in tropopause structure can both indicate and impact changes in the global climate system. The Global Positioning System radio occultation (RO) technique shows tremendous potential for monitoring the global tropopause because of its precision, temporal consistency, and global measurement density. This study examines the capability of RO to monitor the global tropopause by addressing three specific objectives: (1) quantify sources of uncertainty in individual RO tropopause measurements, (2) examine mean bias and long‐term stability of RO tropopause parameters with respect to those obtained from radiosondes, and (3) distinguish between differences due to processing and RO instrument differences by comparing tropopause parameters from different RO products. In this study, we make use of data from four different RO missions, including the recent Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC). RO tropopause uncertainty is shown to be largely due to the use of a highly nonlinear tropopause definition (1.6 K or 510 m), although uncertainties in the RO derived temperature profiles themselves (0.25 K or 75 m) are still significant. Global mean temperature and height biases between RO instruments and radiosondes are within 0.5 K and 75 m. One long‐term RO data set examined in this study appeared to contain spurious temperature trends, but these have since been corrected. Tropopause measurements from different RO instruments are generally within 41 m and 0.1 K for the globe. Dissimilarly processed temperature data, however, can differ by as much as 2 K in the mean. These results confirm the precision of RO data, but also demonstrate the importance of consistent processing for long‐term tropopause temperature studies. Tropopause height data do not appear to be significantly affected by the differences in processing examined in this study.