The paper entitled “Remote sensing of water vapour profiles in the framework of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON)”, by Schneider et al., has been recently published in “Atmospheric Measurement Techniques”

Nowadays, there is a significant investment of resources, both financial and logistical, to consolidate a global network of Fourier Transform InfraRed spectrometers (FTIR), which monitors the greenhouse gas concentrations with very high accuracy. That network, TCCON (Total Carbon Column Observing Network, www.tccon.caltech.edu), measures near infrared solar absorption spectra (2.5 µm – 1 µm) with high quality and high frequency (a measure takes only 2 minutes) at many locations and likely for many years. This makes them very attractive for atmospheric research.

In this context, this work shows the possibility of deriving the vertical distribution of tropospheric water vapour, which is directly linked to Earth’s climate. Thus, the resolution of the TCCON spectra of 0.02 cm−1 is sufficient for retrieving lower and middle/upper tropospheric water vapour concentrations with a vertical resolution of about 3 and 8 km, respectively. We document the good quality of the remotely-sensed profiles by comparisons with coincident in-situ Vaisala RS92 radiosonde measurements.

Full reference: Schneider, M., Sepúlveda, E., García, O., Hase, F., and Blumenstock, T.: Remote sensing of water vapour profiles in the framework of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), Atmos. Meas. Tech., 3, 1785-1795, doi:10.5194/amt-3-1785-2010, 2010.

To download the paper: http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/3/1785/2010/amt-3-1785-2010.html