Abstract

Abstract. Global measurements of atmospheric water vapour isotopologues aid to better understand the hydrological cycle and improve global circulation models. This paper presents a new data set of vertical column densities of H2O and HDO retrieved from short-wave infrared (2.3 µm) reflectance measurements by the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. TROPOMI features daily global coverage with a spatial resolution of up to 7 km×7 km. The retrieval utilises a profile-scaling approach. The forward model neglects scattering, and strict cloud filtering is therefore necessary. For validation, recent ground-based water vapour isotopologue measurements by the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) are employed. A comparison of TCCON δD with ground-based measurements by the Multi-platform remote Sensing of Isotopologues for investigating the Cycle of Atmospheric water (MUSICA) project for data prior to 2014 (where MUSICA data are available) shows a bias in TCCON δD estimates. As TCCON HDO is currently not validated, an overall correction of recent TCCON HDO data is derived based on this finding. The agreement between the corrected TCCON measurements and co-located TROPOMI observations is good with an average bias of (-0.2±3)×1021 molec cm−2 ((1.1±7.2) %) in H2O and (-2±7)×1017 molec cm−2 ((-1.1±7.3) %) in HDO, which corresponds to a mean bias of (-14±17) ‰ in a posteriori δD. The bias is lower at low- and mid-latitude stations and higher at high-latitude stations. The use of the data set is demonstrated with a case study of a blocking anticyclone in northwestern Europe in July 2018 using single-overpass data.

Highlights

  • Atmospheric water vapour represents the strongest natural greenhouse gas and transports a large amount of energy via latent heat; it plays a fundamental role in shaping weather and climate (Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997; Harries, 1997)

  • This was followed by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) on the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura satellite (Worden et al, 2006), the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) onboard the European Space Agency (ESA)’s environmental satellite (ENVISAT) (Steinwagner et al, 2007; Payne et al, 2007), the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmo

  • This work presents a new data set of H2O and HDO columns retrieved from Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) short-wave infrared observations

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Summary

Introduction

Atmospheric water vapour represents the strongest natural greenhouse gas and transports a large amount of energy via latent heat; it plays a fundamental role in shaping weather and climate (Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997; Harries, 1997). H2O and HDO were first retrieved by Zakharov et al (2004) using thermal infrared measurements from the Interferometric Monitor for Greenhouse gases (IMG) sensor onboard the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS). Later, this was followed by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) on the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura satellite (Worden et al, 2006), the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) onboard the European Space Agency (ESA)’s environmental satellite (ENVISAT) (Steinwagner et al, 2007; Payne et al, 2007), the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmo-.

Retrieval method
Ground-based FTIR data sets
Validation of TROPOMI retrievals
Demonstration of applications of the data set
Findings
Summary and conclusions

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