Representativeness of total column water vapour retrievals from instruments on polar orbiting satellites

Diedrich, Hannes; Wittchen, Falco; Preusker, René; Fischer, Jürgen

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-8331-2016

Articles | Volume 16, issue 13

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-8331-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-8331-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 13

Research article

|

11 Jul 2016

Research article |

| 11 Jul 2016

Representativeness of total column water vapour retrievals from instruments on polar orbiting satellites

Hannes Diedrich, Falco Wittchen, René Preusker, and Jürgen Fischer

Data sets

National Center for Atmospheric Research, U. C. f. A. R., NCAR Global, 2-hourly Ground-Based GPS Precipitable Water Earth Observing~Laboratory http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds721.1/

Short summary

As water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, the remote sensing of total column water vapour (TCWV) is an important part of climate research. The remote sensing from polar orbiting, sun-synchronous satellites has some limitations. This study investigates the representativeness of observations from space regarding these limitations. The mean daily variability of the diurnal cycle of TCWV was quantified using a water vapour data set from ground-based observations.