Conveners
Stratospheric Water Vapour
- Christian Rolf (Forschungszentrum Jülich)
Stratospheric Water Vapour
- Daan Hubert (BIRA-IASB)
Stratospheric Water Vapour
- Michaela Hegglin (U. Reading / FZ Jülich)
Hunga, a submarine volcano in the South Pacific, reached an eruption climax on 15 January 2022. This eruption not only led to the largest perturbation in the stratospheric aerosol loading in the last 30 years but also injected around 150 Tg of water directly into the stratosphere, increasing the stratospheric water vapor mass by ∼10% instantaneously. The Hunga eruption has impacted...
The Stratospheric Water and Ozone Satellite Homogenized (SWOOSH) database is a monthly mean merged data set of vertically resolved ozone and water vapor data from a subset of limb profiling instruments operating since the 1980s. In this presentation, we summarize recent updates and improvements to SWOOSH water vapor data that were made as part of the current version 2.7. Changes include...
Balloon-borne frost-point hygrometers have been used for process studies, trend analysis, and validation of satellite and radiosonde measurements for water vapor in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. They use a small mirror, which is cooled (or heated) appropriately, so that the condensate layer on the mirror surface is kept constant throughout the balloon sounding. The mirror...
Knowledge of humidity in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) is of special interest due to its importance for cirrus cloud formation and the resulting climate impact. However, the accurate description of the UTLS water vapor distribution in current weather models is subject to large uncertainties. Here, we develop a dynamic-based humidity correction method using an artificial...
The climactic Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HT-HH) eruption injected an unprecedented amount of water vapour into the stratosphere. As part of the ESA Water Vapour Climate Change Initiative (WV_cci), new vertically resolved climate data records (CDRs) of water vapour in the stratosphere and upper troposphere are used to study the evolution of water vapour injected into the stratosphere. The local...
Water vapor plays an important role in many aspects of the climate system, by affecting radiation, cloud formation, atmospheric chemistry and dynamics. Even the low stratospheric water vapor content provides an important climate feedback, but current climate models and NWP models show a substantial moist bias in the lowermost stratosphere. Here we report crucial sensitivity of the atmospheric...
The significant climate feedback of stratospheric water vapor (SWV) necessitates accurate estimates of SWV budget changes, with the strongest impacts expected in the tropical and extratropical lower stratosphere, often referred to as the lowermost stratosphere (LMS). Common data sources to quantify SWV variability over the past 3-4 decades in this critical region include satellite observations...
The ECMWF stratospheric humidity analysis is currently unaffected by assimilation, in both the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) configuration and the Atmospheric Composition configuration that is used by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), because the analysis increments are forced to be zero above a diagnosed model tropopause. The humidity near the tropopause is incremented...
The latest KIT-IMK/CSIC-IAA MIPAS V8 water vapour data set is presented. We discuss the major changes with respect to preceding data versions, and show data characterization and a thorough error analysis. One achievement of the V8 data set is the improved agreement between different MIPAS measurement modes, as well as a consistency improvement between the MIPAS nominal mode measurements with...
Limb missions like MIPAS, ACE-FTS, or Aura/MLS have already ended or are expected to end several years before respective next-generation missions will be operative (e.g. the current ESA Earth Explorer 11 candidate CAIRT).
Here we present our updated MUSICA IASI processor and investigate the anomalies of H2O, N2O and SO2 as observed in the UTLS and the stratosphere during the Hunga...
The Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT) is one of the two remaining candidate missions competing for implementation as ESA’s Earth Explorer 11. CAIRT aims to reveal, resolve, and unravel the complex coupling between composition, circulation, and climate in our middle atmosphere, by improving our knowledge of the chemical-dynamic-radiative interactions that govern our...
Mesoscale distributions of water vapour can be detected by means of the infrared limb-imaging technique. The Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere (GLORIA) has been deployed onboard different aircraft and balloon platforms during measurement campaigns focusing on regions from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Here, we present airborne GLORIA observations of mesoscale water...
