Abstract

In the fall of 1997 the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program conducted a study of water-vapor-abundance-measurement at its southern Great Plains site. The large number of instruments included four solar radiometers to measure the columnar water vapor (CWV) by measuring solar transmittance in the 0.94-µm water-vapor absorption band. At first, no attempt was made to standardize our procedures to the same radiative transfer model and its underlying water-vapor spectroscopy. In the second round of comparison we used the same line-by-line code (which includes recently corrected H₂O spectroscopy) to retrieve CWV from all four solar radiometers, thus decreasing the mean CWV by 8–13%. The remaining spread of 8% is an indication of the other-than-model uncertainties involved in the retrieval.

© 2001 Optical Society of America

Three-channel solar radiometer for the determination of atmospheric columnar water vapor

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