Wednesday, 13 January 2016: 8:45 AM
Room 350/351 ( New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
High temporal resolution profiles of water vapor are critical for a wide range of operational and research applications. Two very different technologies are able to provide profiles of water vapor: the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI), which measures downwelling spectral infrared radiance from which water vapor profiles are retrieved, and the diode-laser-based Water Vapor Differential Absorption Lidar (WVDIAL), which transmits laser energy at two different wavelengths and the differences in the returned signal in the two wavelengths as a function of height is directly proportional to the amount of water vapor in the vertical profile.
An AERI and WVDIAL were collocated during two field experiments: FRAPPE in the front range of Colorado in the summer of 2014 and PECAN in west-central Kansas in the summer of 2015. Radiosondes were launched at the same locations of each experiment, and comparisons of the three techniques will be presented. Furthermore, a new retrieval that uses the water vapor observations from the WVDIAL in the AERI retrieval will be presented to show the increase in the information content and accuracy of the temperature retrievals. Finally, how these sensors could be utilized in a national network will be presented.
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