Interpolation uncertainty of atmospheric temperature radiosoundings

This paper is motivated by the fact that, although temperature readings made by Vaisala RS41 radiosondes at GRUAN sites (http://www.gruan.org) are given at 1 s resolution, for various reasons, missing data are spread along the atmospheric profile. Such a problem is quite common in radiosonde data and other profile data. Hence, (linear) interpolation is often used to fill the gaps in published data products. In this perspective, the present paper considers interpolation uncertainty. To do this, a statistical approach is introduced giving some understanding of the consequences of substituting missing data by interpolated ones. In particular, a general frame for the computation of interpolation uncertainty based on a Gaussian process (GP) set-up is developed. Using the GP characteristics, a simple formula for computing the linear interpolation standard error is given. Moreover, the GP interpolation is proposed as it provides an alternative interpolation method with its standard error. For the Vaisala RS41, the two approaches are shown to give similar interpolation performances using an extensive cross-validation approach based on the block-bootstrap technique. Statistical results about interpolation uncertainties at various GRUAN sites and for various missing gap lengths are provided. Since both provide an underestimation of the cross-validation interpolation uncertainty, a bootstrap-based correction formula is proposed. Using the root mean square error, it is found that, for short gaps, with an average length of 5 s, the average uncertainty is smaller than 0.10 K. For larger gaps, it increases up to 0.35 K for an average gap length of 30 s, and up to 0.58 K for a gap of 60 s.