Retrieval of global water vapour columns from GOME-2 and first applications in polar regions

Abstract

International audienceGlobal total water vapour columns have been derived from measurements of the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2 (GOME-2) on MetOp. For this purpose, the Air Mass Corrected Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (AMC-DOAS) method has been adapted, which has already been applied successfully to GOME (on ERS-2) and SCIAMACHY (SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY, on ENVISAT) data. Comparisons between the derived GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY water vapour columns show a good overall agreement. This gives confidence that the time series of water vapour columns from GOME-type instruments which started in 1995 can be continued by the MetOp instrumentation until at least 2020. The enhanced temporal and spatial resolution of GOME-2 enables the analysis of short-term variations particularly in the polar regions. This is especially important since atmospheric data sources in the polar regions are generally sparse. As an exemplary application, daily water vapour concentrations over the polar research station Ny Ålesund (78°55'19" N/11°56'33" E) are investigated. At this latitude GOME-2 gives about six data points during daylight hours at varying local times. The results of this study show that it is possible to derive information about the diurnal variability of water vapour in polar regions from GOME-2 measurements