Comparison of columnar water-vapor measurements from solar transmittance methods
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Schmid, Beat, Joseph J. Michalsky, Donald W. Slater, James C. Barnard, Rangasayi N. Halthore, James C. Liljegren, Brent N. Holben, et al. “Comparison of Columnar Water-Vapor Measurements from Solar Transmittance Methods.” Applied Optics 40, no. 12 (April 20, 2001): 1886–96. https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.40.001886.
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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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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.