Abstract:Observations of brightness temperature from microwave humidity sounders carried on polar-orbiting environment satellites S-NPP, MetOp-A and FY-3 B can reflect structural distributions of water vapor, cloud and rainband around hurricanes. In this paper, the brightness temperature observations were used at microwave humidity sounding channel with its weight function maximum located at near 800 hPa and the all-sky ERA5 reanalysis simulations. Taking hurricanes Sandy and Isaac as examples, the satellite observed and ERA5 simulated center positions were obtained by the azimuth spectrum hurricane center positioning method were compared. The average difference between the center position of hurricane Sandy(Isaac) and the best track is 35.8 km(32.9 km) based on brightness temperature observations from the ATMS carried by the afternoon satellite S-NPP and the MHS carried by the morning satellite MetOp-A, but as large as 73.3 km(82.1 km) based on the ERA5 all-sky simulations. For tropical storm, if grouped into tropical storm and hurricane intensity categories, the average distance from the best track determined by satellite observations and ERA5 simulations is 36.5 km and 105.9 km, respectively for hurricanes, they are 25.8 km and 56.4 km, respectively. If ATMS was replaced by FY-3 B MWHS-2, similar results were obtained. ERA5 is a representative global atmospheric reanalysis dataset. The reason for a relatively large error of the hurricane center position obtained by the azimuth spectrum hurricane center positioning method is that the structural distributions of the all-sky ERA5 brightness temperature simulations are quite different from the brightness temperature observations within hurricanes. In fact, the spatial distributions of simulated brightness temperatures are very similar to those of the ice water path. This research should be helpful to all-sky brightness temperature data assimilation for hurricane numerical prediction.