Water vapor is well known to be a critical component in many aspects of atmospheric research, such as radiative transfer and cloud and aerosol processes. The distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere is highly variable, both in time and in space, and has proven to be very difficult to measure accurately. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program’s overa...

A new retrieval technique has been developed which resolves some of the vertical structure of lower tropospheric water vapor over Oceans from space. 'The relationship is demonstrated by comparisons between direct measurements of the water vapor profile, by radiosondes, and coincident estimates of the horizontal turbulence structure of Integrated Water Vapor, wing the TOPEX Microwave Radiometer ...

The sensitivity of Earth's climate to an external radiative forcing depends critically on the response of water vapor. We use the global cooling and drying of the atmosphere that was observed after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo to test model predictions of the climate feedback from water vapor. Here, we first highlight the success of the model in reproducing the observed drying after the volca...

A new lidar instrument has been developed to measure tropospheric ozone and water vapor at low altitude. The lidar uses Raman scattering of an UV beam from atmospheric nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor to retrieve ozone and water-vapor vertical profiles. By numerical simulation we investigate the sensitivity of the method to both atmospheric and device perturbations. The aerosol optical effect ...

There are distinct spectral features of water vapor in the wavelength range covered by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) visible channel. Although these features are much weaker than those at longer wavelengths, they can be exploited to retrieve useful information about water vapor. They have an advantage in that their small optical depth leads to fairly simple interpretation as measurement...

Vapor movement is often an important part in the total water flux in the vadose zone of arid or semiarid regions because the soil moisture is relatively low. The twomajor objectives of this study were to develop a numerical model in the HYDRUS-1D code that (i) solves the coupled equations governing liquid water, water vapor, and heat transport, together with the surface water and energy balance...

We explored the role of the water vapor content below the freezing level in the response of idealized supercell storm electrical processes to increased concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Using the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with parameterizations electrification and discharging, we performed 30 simulations by varying both the CCN concentration and water vapor...

Three-dimensional water vapor can be reconstructed from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations, which can study 3-D profile variations of atmospheric water vapor and climate. However, there is a large uncertainty of water vapor tomography from single GPS system observations due to limited satellites. The rapid development of multi-GNSS, including China’s Beidou Navigation Satell...

The knowledge of spatial distributions of water vapor is very important in atmospheric studies. Often satellite observations, for instance AVHRR, are used to study spatial distributions of water vapor. This method, however, has a limited spatial resolution of about 1 km and does not cover the entire atmospheric column. An alternative way to estimate the spatial behavior of the water vapor is to...

An intracavity water vapor cell in conjunction with a CO laser was used to measure experimentally the absorptive losses introduced for nineteen of the laser emission lines. The results indicated that the existing theoretical models are inadequate for predicting actual absorptance values for water vapor partial pressures in excess of 100 Torr. The accepted spectral location of at least one water...