September 2015: Release of relative humidity profile products

Layer-averaged Relative Humidity profiles are now available on the ICARE data center  since the launch of the Megha-Tropiques satellite. This product decomposes the troposphere into 6 layers: 100-200hPa, 250-350hPa, 400-600hPa, 650-700hPa, 750-800hPa and 850-950hPa. The retrieval scheme named ARPIA for « Atmospheric Relative humidity profile Including the Analysis of confidence intervals » encompasses the estimation of the mean RH as well as its standard deviation interpreted as the 1-sigma confidence interval. ARPIA considered cloud-free and cloudy conditions, oceanic and continental scenes. The only limit is for icy layers on top of convective clouds and for precipitating conditions, which are withdrawn using the Hong et al (2005) threshold method adapted for SAPHIR channels.

The details of the method is described in a recently submitted paper (Brogniez et al., hopefully soon available)