bug: GOES ABI obs converter gives incorrect wavelength channel
Describe the bug
-
List the steps someone needs to take to reproduce the bug.
Useconvert_goes_ABI_L1b.f90to generate obs_seq.out file for GOES AB1 16 radiance satellite data. -
What was the expected outcome? That the code would assign the appropriate IR channel (1-16) to the obs_seq file, such that the forward operator (RTTOV) can use the appropriate calculation to obtain the expected radiance for that channel (band wavelength)
-
What actually happened?
The obs converter offsets the channel (band_id) by 6. Thus channel 8 (for example) is encoded in obs_seq file as channel 2. This causes RTTOV to calculate the radiance for a completely different and incorrect waveband (0.64 micron instead of 6.2 micron for channel 2 and 8 respectively).
Error Message
Doesn't provide an error message because Channel 2 is still a viable wavelength. The result is that this gives incorrect expected prior observations from RTTOV. In this case, RTTOV returned a radiance of 0, because Channel 2 is a visible wavelength which cannot be generated from atmospheric emission (with namelist value addsolar = .false.) --- only from reflected solar. Channel 8 is an IR wavelength sensitive to upper atmosphere water vapor.
Which model(s) are you working with?
WRF4.4
Version of DART
latest
Have you modified the DART code?
No -- but fix is simple, just remove offset in obs converter. We also need to improve RTTOV documentation such that users check their rttov_sensor_db.csv, as well as their rtcoef (coefficent) files to makes sure the wavelength matches correctly. It is easy to have mismatching wavebands depending on the rtceof file used, can be UV/IR/NIR/VIS or IR only , which changes the number of wavebands.
Build information
Please describe:
Derecho using intel with RTTOV libraries.