Earth System Science Data
Earth System Science Data
Earth System Science Data
Articles | Volume 10, issue 1
Articles | Volume 10, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-449-2018
© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-449-2018
© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 10, issue 1
Review article
 | 
12 Mar 2018
Review article |  | 12 Mar 2018

The ESA GOME-Evolution “Climate” water vapor product: a homogenized time series of H2O columns from GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2

Steffen Beirle, Johannes Lampel, Yang Wang, Kornelia Mies, Steffen Dörner, Margherita Grossi, Diego Loyola, Angelika Dehn, Anja Danielczok, Marc Schröder, and Thomas Wagner

Abstract. We present time series of the global distribution of water vapor columns over more than 2 decades based on measurements from the satellite instruments GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2 in the red spectral range. A particular focus is the consistency amongst the different sensors to avoid jumps from one instrument to another. This is reached by applying robust and simple retrieval settings consistently. Potentially systematic effects due to differences in ground pixel size are avoided by merging SCIAMACHY and GOME-2 observations to GOME spatial resolution, which also allows for a consistent treatment of cloud effects. In addition, the GOME-2 swath is reduced to that of GOME and SCIAMACHY to have consistent viewing geometries.

Remaining systematic differences between the different sensors are investigated during overlap periods and are corrected for in the homogenized time series. The resulting Climate product v2.2 (https://doi.org/10.1594/WDCC/GOME-EVL_water_vapor_clim_v2.2) allows the study of the temporal evolution of water vapor over the last 20 years on a global scale.

How to cite. Beirle, S., Lampel, J., Wang, Y., Mies, K., Dörner, S., Grossi, M., Loyola, D., Dehn, A., Danielczok, A., Schröder, M., and Wagner, T.: The ESA GOME-Evolution “Climate” water vapor product: a homogenized time series of H2O columns from GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 449–468, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-449-2018, 2018.
Received: 06 Sep 2017 – Discussion started: 28 Sep 2017 – Revised: 19 Jan 2018 – Accepted: 22 Jan 2018 – Published: 12 Mar 2018
Download
Short summary
We present time series of the global distribution of water vapor over more than 2 decades based on satellite measurements from different sensors. A particular focus is the consistency amongst the different sensors to avoid jumps from one instrument to another. This is reached by applying robust and simple retrieval settings consistently. The resulting Climate product allows the study of the temporal evolution of water vapor over the last 20 years on a global scale.
Read more