Horizontal small-scale variability of water vapor in the atmosphere: implications for intercomparison of data from different measuring systems

Calbet, Xavier; Carbajal Henken, Cintia; DeSouza-Machado, Sergio; Sun, Bomin; Reale, Tony

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-7105-2022

Articles | Volume 15, issue 23

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-7105-2022

© 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-15-7105-2022

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

Articles | Volume 15, issue 23

Research article

|

09 Dec 2022

Research article |

| 09 Dec 2022

Horizontal small-scale variability of water vapor in the atmosphere: implications for intercomparison of data from different measuring systems

Xavier Calbet, Cintia Carbajal Henken, Sergio DeSouza-Machado, Bomin Sun, and Tony Reale

Data sets

OLCI data ESA https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/technical-guides/sentinel-3-olci/level-2/products-description

Sonde data GRUAN ftp://ftp.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/gruan/processing/level2/RS92-GDP/version-002

Short summary

Water vapor concentration in the atmosphere at small scales (< 6 km) is considered. The measurements show Gaussian random field behavior following Kolmogorov's theory of turbulence two-thirds law. These properties can be useful when estimating the water vapor variability within a given observed satellite scene or when different water vapor measurements have to be merged consistently.