Bremen 2017 – scientific programme

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UP: Fachverband Umweltphysik

UP 5: Postersession

UP 5.17: Poster

Tuesday, March 14, 2017, 16:40–18:10, GW2 B3010

Merged Total Water Vapour product from AMSU-B and AMSR-E data in the Arctic region — •Arantxa Triana Gómez, Georg Heygster, and Christian Melsheimer — Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Water vapour plays a key role in the global climate system, and its global continuous knowledge is required for numerical weather prediction and climate models. Microwave imagers like SSM/I or AMSR-E have routinely provided daily vertically integrated water vapour content (total water vapour, TWV) over open ocean for more than 30 years, but not over the vast areas of the polar sea and land ice. Over those surfaces, a newer method based on data of the microwave humidity sounders AMSU-B and MHS, on the NOAA and METOP satellites respectively, gives the TWV. However, at the edges of the coverage of both methods some discrepancies have been observed. The first steps towards merging these two complementary datasets will be presented. This will eventually provide an Arctic-wide daily dataset of 50 km resolution with seamless coverage from the high Arctic to mid-latitudes from 2002 until now. With that, an assessment of water vapour distribution and temporal variations is possible.