Validation of SCIAMACHY AMC-DOAS water vapour columns

In confirmation of previous results it could be shown that SCIAMACHY derivedwater vapour columns are typically slightly lower than both SSM/I and ECMWFdata, especially over ocean areas.However, these deviations are much smaller than the observed scatter of thedata which is caused by the different temporal and spatial sampling andresolution of the data sets.For example, the overall difference with ECMWF data is only-0.05 g/cm2 whereas the typical scatter is in the order of0.5 g/cm2.Both values show almost no variation over the year.

In addition, first monthly means of SCIAMACHY water vapour data have beencomputed.The quality of these monthly means is currently limited by theavailability of calibrated SCIAMACHY spectra.Nevertheless, first comparisons with ECMWF data show that SCIAMACHY (andsimilar instruments) are able to provide a new independent global water vapourdata set. 展开▼