Ten Years of Measurements of Tropical Upper-Tropospheric Water Vapor by MOZAIC. Part II: Assessing the ECMWF Humidity Analysis

In a recent publication (Part I), the authors introduced a data source—Measurement of Ozone and Water Vapor by Airbus In-Service Aircraft (MOZAIC)—for monitoring and studying upper-tropospheric water vapor (UTWV) and analyzed 10 yr (1994–2004) of MOZAIC measurements of tropical UTWV in its climatology, variability, transport, and relation to deep convection. In this study (Part II), MOZAIC is used to assess the ECMWF humidity analysis over the tropics, taking advantage of the unique nature of the MOZAIC data, namely, the long data record, near-global coverage, and high accuracy. In parallel to Part I, the ECMWF UTWV analysis is assessed against MOZAIC in the following five aspects: 1) annual cycle, 2) vertical structure, 3) probability density functions (PDFs), 4) moisture flux divergence, and 5) interannual variability. The annual cycle of the ECMWF UTWV shows a similar pattern as MOZAIC but has an overall dry bias of about 10%–30% relative humidity with respect to ice (RHi). The dry biases are larger in the deep tropics than the subtropics and larger over the Asian monsoon region than the tropical Atlantic region. The increase in RH with height (from about 300 to 200 hPa) as observed by MOZAIC is largely missing in the ECMWF analysis, which has a roughly constant RH profile. The bimodal distribution of tropical UTWV is well established in MOZAIC, but for ECMWF, the moist mode is abruptly cut off at 100% RHi due to the lack of ice supersaturation (ISS) in the forecast model. Lack of ISS capability is, however, not the only cause for the dry bias in the ECMWF; it also has more occurrences of lower humidity compared to MOZAIC. There is also evidence that ECMWF underestimates the range of uppertropospheric humidity (UTH) variation. A comparison of moisture flux divergence is conducted to assess the ability of ECMWF to capture the divergent transport of water vapor. It is shown that the ECMWF can represent the distribution of this quantity fairly well, although the dry bias leads to some underestimate of the magnitude. Finally, the authors show a comparison of the ECMWF and MOZAIC depictions of the interannual variation of UTWV during the 1997/98 ENSO event as an illustration that UTWV variations are more difficult to capture than those of the UT temperature.