Passive remote sensing of the atmospheric water vapour content above land surfaces

Abstract

The global distribution of the atmospheric water vapour content plays an important role in the weather forecast and climate research. Nowadays there exist various methods dealing with remote sensing of the atmospheric water vapour content. Unfortunately, most of them are restricted to ocean areas, since, in general, the emission of land surfaces is not known well enough. Therefore, a new method is developed which allows the detection of the atmospheric total water vapour content from aircraft or satellite with the aid of backscattered solar radiation in the near infrared above land surfaces. The Matrix-Operator-Method has been used to simulate backscattered solar radiances, including various atmospheric profiles of temperature, pressure, water vapour, and aerosols of various types, several sun zenith angles, and different types of land surfaces. From these calculations it can be concluded, that the detection of water vapour content in cloudless atmospheres is possible with an error of < 10 % even for higher aerosol contents. In addition to the theoretical results first comparisons with aircraft measurements of the backscattered solar radiances are shown. These measurements have been carried out with the aid of OVID (Optical Visible and near Infrared Detector), a new multichannel array spectrometer, in 1993.