Water vapor estimation based on 1-year data of E-band millimeter wave link in North China

Zheng, Siming; Huo, Juan; Cai, Wenbing; Zhang, Yinhui; Li, Peng; Zhang, Gaoyuan; Ji, Baofeng; Zhou, Jiafeng; Han, Congzheng

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-1675-2022

Articles | Volume 15, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-1675-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Analysis of atmospheric water vapour observations and their...

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-1675-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 6

Research article

|

22 Mar 2022

Research article |

| 22 Mar 2022

Water vapor estimation based on 1-year data of E-band millimeter wave link in North China

Siming Zheng, Juan Huo, Wenbing Cai, Yinhui Zhang, Peng Li, Gaoyuan Zhang, Baofeng Ji, Jiafeng Zhou, and Congzheng Han

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Mar 2022)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Nov 2021)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on amt-2021-305', Ruben Imhoff, 15 Nov 2021

Dear authors,

I would like to thank you for the submitted manuscript. I think it is an interesting study. You can find my review in the attached PDF.

Sincerely,

Ruben Imhoff

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Siming Zheng, 29 Nov 2021
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://amt.copernicus.org/preprints/amt-2021-305/amt-2021-305-AC1-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-AC1
CC1:
'Comment on amt-2021-305', Yoav Rubin, 19 Jan 2022

In this paper, the authors examined the potential for humidity measurements using microwaves in the E-Band frequency range. I find it very exciting to see such high performance when you take such a long link in high frequencies.

It is remarkable to compare seasons with such high temporal resolution and such high performance. I think these research findings are important and worth publishing.

- Section 2.2: It is not clear how did you choose the period for calibration. How and for how long do you choose the period for estimating the median before calculating the humidity? It seems that you choose the dry period of each season. If so, why did you choose this approach? have you tried different approaches/periods?

I think there needs to be more information about the method you used for retrieving the humidity.

- In section 2.1 you mentioned a very interesting point regarding the differences between RSLm at different seasons. I think it is one of your main conclusion that you should pay more attention to it. What are the main causes for these inter-seasonal changes? When do you see the sharpest changes? This information can be very helpful in the future for operational purposes.

*This part of section 2.1 is related to the ref values for calibration in section 2.2. This order can be confusing. Maybe you should talk about it after explaining the "Principles of Estimating Water Vapor"

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-CC1
- AC3: 'Reply on CC1', Siming Zheng, 28 Jan 2022
  
  Thanks for the reviewer to provide very useful comments and suggestions, and please see our responses in the file.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-AC3
RC2:
'Comment on amt-2021-305', Anonymous Referee #3, 24 Jan 2022

In general, this paper has been well prepared, and presented the experiments conducted in North China regarding the application of microwave signal linkage to retrieve the temporal variation in the water vapor near the ground surface. There are also some theoretical analyses.

For Figure 1, please add the name for the horizontal axis and vertical axis.

For Figure 2, what time is used, local Beijing time, or the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)?

Line 86, rewrite as "The data recorded by the local weather station include humidity, ....".

For each season, as shown in Figure 4, I would suggest the authors to use the same scale for the months within that season, which will be convenient for the readers to compare.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Siming Zheng, 28 Jan 2022
  
  Thanks for the reviewer to provide very useful comments and suggestions, and please see our responses in the file.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2021-305-AC2

Peer review completion

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

AR by Siming Zheng on behalf of the Authors (28 Jan 2022) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Feb 2022) by Thomas Wagner

RR by Ruben Imhoff (09 Feb 2022)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (17 Feb 2022) by Thomas Wagner

AR by Siming Zheng on behalf of the Authors (21 Feb 2022) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Feb 2022) by Thomas Wagner

Short summary

We demonstrated the processing of millimeter wave link data with a time resolution of 1 min for 60 dry periods from August 2020 to July 2021. We have proposed a new method for extracting water vapor attenuation values and applied this method to data processing within this year. We found that the water vapor density value obtained from the millimeter wave link is highly correlated with the actual measurement value of the weather station.