Final Report for ARM Project Measuring 4-D Water Vapor Fields with GPS

Abstract

Water vapor is a primary element in the Earth’s climate system. Atmospheric water vapor is central to cloud processes, radiation transfer, and the hydrological cycle. Using funding from Department of Energy (DOE) grant DE-FG03-02ER63327, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) developed new observational techniques to measure atmospheric water vapor and applied these techniques to measure four dimensional water vapor fields throughout the United States Southern Great Plains region. This report summarizes the development of a new observation from ground based Global Positioning System (GPS) stations called Slant Water Vapor (SW) and it’s utilization in retrieving four dimensional water vapor fields. The SW observation represents the integrated amount of water vapor between a GPS station and a transmitting satellite. SW observations provide improved temporal and spatial sampling of the atmosphere when compared to column-integrated quantities such as preciptitable water vapor (PW). Under funding from the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, GPS networks in the Southern Great Plains (SGP) region were deployed to retrieve SW to improve the characterization of water vapor throughout the region. These observations were used to estimate four dimensional water vapor fields using tomographic approaches and through assimilation into the MM5 numerical weather model.