2022-03-08 For some months the netcdf and map files contain the same data every day. We are working on the problem. Thank you for your patience!
Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas and the source of cloud and precipitation. Continuous observations over Arctic sea ice, land ice, and open water are rare. In polar regions, where water vapor content is low, satellite retrieval of water vapor is more challenging.
The composite of two datasets of vertically integrated water vapor (called total water vapor or integrated water vapor) for the Arctic is presented here. It is generated by combining retrievals from the microwave imagers AMSR-E/2 over open water using an existing dataset from Remote Sensing Systems [2] and a new retrieval from the humidity sounders AMSU-B and MHS onboard the NOAA and METOP satellite platforms [1]. The dataset contains daily total water vapor with about 50 km spatial resolution from the high Arctic to mid-latitudes starting in 2003, based on AMSU-B/MHS and AMSR-E observations.
For more detailed investigations swath data are available for the years 2006 and 2007, in addition to the daily product. The retrieval results from each single sensor footprint of the sounders AMSU-B in an ungridded swath format are combined in daily files, and made available in the directory 'AMSU-B_swath' in the data archive (see link below under "Data Access".
More information can be found in the references below and in the Data User Guide.
This is a new data release. If you find any problems please contact us. Please support this service by acknowledging and citing the data.
All data can be found in the WaterVapor directory in the Data Archive. Also accessible via ftp (active mode). More information about data access can be found under Data Archive on the front page.
Triana-Gómez, A. M., C. Melsheimer, G. Heygster, G. Spreen (2021): Composite Total Water Vapor Dataset From AMSU-B/MHS and AMSR-E/2. Version 1.0. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. Available online at https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/water-vapor/
Please include more references from the publication list below as appropriate.
This work is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project no. 268020496 – TRR 172, within the Transregional Collaborative Research Center “ArctiC Amplification: Climate Relevant Atmospheric and SurfaCe Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms”, (AC)3, as well as the project INTAROS (INTegratedArctic Observation System) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under GA 727890.
We very much appreciate the provision of TWV data by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). AMSR TWV data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and were sponsored by the NASA AMSR-E Science Team and the NASA Earth Science MEaSUREs Program. Data are available at www.remss.com.
For more information or questions please contact Arantxa Triana-Gómez, Christian Melsheimer, Georg Heygster, or Gunnar Spreen