TIGR2 TIGR3 Dripping Wet

TIGR stands for Thermodynamic Initial Guess Retrieval, and is a dataset selected from a whole bunch of radiosonde measurements lately supplemented by space based measurements. Among other things each of the atmospheric profiles in the dataset has composition information including temperature, water vapor and ozone. Among the uses for TIGR is the ability to reconstruct atmospheric transmission and absorption.

The various flavors of TIGR are

• TIGR : 398 atmospheres (1985)
• TIGR1 : 1207 atmospheric profiles
• TIGR2 : 1761 atmospheric profiles
• TIGR3 : 2311 atmospheric profiles
  • new tropical atmospheric profiles
  • mid-lat and polar atmospheric profiles unchanged
• TIGR2000 : 2311 atmospheres
  • TIGR3 +
  • The ozone profile is deduced from the Ugamp climatology (Li and Shine, 1995)
  • change in the longitude convention : -180:+180
• TIGR2000_6CORPS : 2311 atmospheres
  • ATMOS measurements have been used to improve the extrapolation of the water vapour towards the upper pressure levels.

Now some bunny out there in the audience, maybe the only one not texting to his friends or wondering why the Brits didn't side with the confederates ( it was the Quakers ), noticed the emphasis on new tropical atmospheric profiles in TIGR3.

Well, if you had been visiting Eli's recommended sites you would know that SoD has been re-exploring Miskolczi in great detail, you know, the guy who thinks the optical depth of the atmosphere is fixed by the equation fairy. After lord knows how many hours, SoD came to the sensible conclusion that

In summary – this paper does not contain a theory. Just because someone writes lots of equations down in attempt to back up some experimental work, it is not theory.
If the author has some experimental work and no theory, that is what he should present – look what I have found, I have a few ideas but can someone help develop a theory to explain these results.
Obviously the author believes he does have a theory. But it’s just equation soufflé.

Which is pretty much what Nick Stokes and Eli could have told him from our first encounter with the Hungarian Meteorological Service which published the original recipe in 2007 (btw, the Service appears to have come to the same conclusion lately.)

I think Miskolczi's paper could have been written in two sentences:

"The greenhouse gas theory that has been used for the last century is TOTALLY WRONG! The proof is left as an exercise for the reader."

Seriously, if you are making a claim like this, you need a good argument, put with some clarity. You would usually write down a model with some unknowns, state some physical principles with their resulting equations, and derive relations which characterise the unknowns. M does this, but at least three of his basic equations appear to be totally wrong. They actually look like elementary errors. Or if they are right, it seems no-one can explain them.

So this is Black Knight stuff. OK the use of Kirchhoff may be wrong, not sure about virial or that pesky Eq 7, but can anyone prove this is wrong, or that? People just lose patience.

But, to tell the truth Eli is an old bunny, with little time, and certainly not willing to collapse the equation souffle that is thrust at him. OTOH, Eli does place a great deal of weight on the data, and what little data Mis presents comes from TIGR2. TIGR2 you say? Doesn't that have a much drier tropical atmosphere than even TIGR3, which was certainly available to Mis, and doesn't using a drier tropical atmosphere really really make the optical depth of what you calculate like way lower than it really is.

Glad you asked. That was a question that the folks from the keepers of the TIGR database at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique de CNRS confronted in 1998 in the Journal of Applied Meteorology 37, 1385, M. Chevallier, Cheruy, Scott an dChedin. Know what they pointed out



The optical depth that Miskolczi calculates from TIGR2 is much too low. It's all sausage