Tropospheric water vapor profiles obtained with FTIR: comparison with balloon-borne frost point hygrometers and influence on trace gas retrievals

Ortega, Ivan; Buchholz, Rebecca R.; Hall, Emrys G.; Hurst, Dale F.; Jordan, Allen F.; Hannigan, James W.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-873-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-873-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-873-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

Research article

|

08 Feb 2019

Research article |

| 08 Feb 2019

Tropospheric water vapor profiles obtained with FTIR: comparison with balloon-borne frost point hygrometers and influence on trace gas retrievals

Ivan Ortega, Rebecca R. Buchholz, Emrys G. Hall, Dale F. Hurst, Allen F. Jordan, and James W. Hannigan

Download

Final revised paper (published on 08 Feb 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Oct 2018)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Referee comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 13 Nov 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #2', I. Ortega, 10 Jan 2019
RC2: 'Review', Matthias Schneider, 13 Dec 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Matthias Schneider', I. Ortega, 10 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by I. Ortega on behalf of the Authors (10 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (24 Jan 2019) by Martin Riese

AR by I. Ortega on behalf of the Authors (30 Jan 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

In this work we evaluate the accuracy of water vapor ground-based FTIR retrievals in the lower and upper troposphere using coincident high-quality vertically resolved balloon-borne NOAA FPH measurements. Our results suggest that highly structured water vapor vertical gradients are captured with the FTIR and found a negligible bias in the immediate layer above the instrument altitude accounting for a water vapor time variability of less than 2 %.