Retrieval of total water vapour column amounts from GOME/ERS-2 data Original Research Article

A method for the retrieval of vertical column amounts of atmospheric water vapour from measurements of the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) in the visible spectral region is presented. Originally developed for the determination of global ozone concentrations, the GOME instrument is operating successfully on ERS-2 since 1995, providing information also on several other atmospheric constituents like NO2, BrO, OClO, H2CO, SO2, and recently also H2O. The method for the derivation of water vapour amounts is based on the Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) approach, which has been extended to take into account effects arising from a strongly wavelength dependent absorption. Further improvements of the algorithm now allow to retrieve water vapour column densities under all cloud conditions. First results show an acceptable agreement between total water vapour columns derived from GOME measurements and H2O columns obtained from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager SSM/I data, although the scatter of the GOME data is high, which needs to be further investigated.