Abstract
Water vapor, as one of the most important greenhouse gases, is crucial for both climate and atmospheric studies. Considering the high spatial and temporal variations of water vapor, a timely and accurate retrieval of precipitable water vapor (PWV) is urgently needed, but has long been constrained by data availability. Our study derived the vertically integrated precipitable water vapor over eastern China using Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT) data, which is in geostationary orbit with high temporal resolution. The missing pixels caused by cloud contamination were reconstructed using an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) decomposition method over both spatial and temporal dimensions. GPS meteorology data were used to validate the retrieval and the reconstructed results. The diurnal variation of PWV over eastern China was analyzed using harmonic analysis, which indicates that the reconstructed PWV data can depict the diurnal cycle of PWV caused by evapotranspiration and local thermal circulation.
Highlights
Water vapor plays an important role in many atmospheric processes, such as radiative cooling, latent heating, cloud formation and convective activity [1,2,3]
Sobrino et al introduced a split-window covariance-variance ratio (SWCVR) to estimate the precipitable water vapor (PWV) by assuming surface temperature changed much faster than air temperature within a small field of view [26], but the results showed that SWCVR
The correlation coefficient is 0.79 and the root mean square error (RMSE) is 9.19 mm if constant coefficients are assumed throughout the year
Summary
Water vapor plays an important role in many atmospheric processes, such as radiative cooling, latent heating, cloud formation and convective activity [1,2,3]. As the most abundant greenhouse gas, characterization of water vapor at high spatial and temporal resolution is important for understanding and forecasting climate change [4]. The spatial and temporal variations of water vapor have strong impacts on atmospheric stability and the radiation budget. Space-borne satellite observations of water vapor have provided a synoptic view of the atmosphere for over two decades [10,11]. The MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), on board the NASA TERRA and AQUA Spacecraft platforms, is one of the most widely used sensors for water vapor retrieval. MODIS products have been used for many territory-wide and regional-scale applications [12,13,14]
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