Integrated Upper Air Water Vapor Systems

This paper describes a new concept of providing and integrating water vapor measurements from the surface to various points aloft throughout the troposphere using different sensors all situated together. One day this approach to sensing the atmosphere for this critical atmospheric parameter could become a continuous and near real-time method unlike today where it is sporadic and requires expendables to be used up. The composite system will be described in general terms and its integration delineated so one can perceive how a continuous monitoring of water vapor aloft could be obtained sometime in the future. A Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) initiative has been approved for two vendors to develop portions of the composite system. No details from their designs will be divulged in this abstract; rather it will provide an overview of the overall concept and how the pieces could be integrated into a new composite real-time water vapor monitoring system. Other aspects of the system already exist and could be integrated easily into the overall architecture of the composite system. One challenge will be the use of commercial-off-the-shelf data basing products for integrating and time-syncing the different datasets, thus providing users and numerical weather prediction models a consistent and highly temporal set of water vapor observations. Preliminary thoughts on a potential network configuration will also be provided as it pertains to this concept.