Determination of biases and drifts from intercomparison of stratospheric water vapour satellite records - a contribution to the SPARC WAVAS-II activity

The figure shows the mean bias profiles of each data record against the average of all other data records (left: absolute biases; right: relative biases). The comparisons is based on inter-instrument coincidences during all seasons and at all latitudes. Each single-coincidence contribution to the biases is weighted by the total number of coincidences between the respective two data sets in order to weight dense and scarce samplers equally; within this weighting, all MIPAS data records are counted as one. For the sake of better visibility the results have been split among three rows. The separation is also reflected by the legend columns. In the legend the number of comparisons contributing to the summary for the individual data sets is also indicated.

The WAVAS-II activity has the goal to provide a seft-consistent and thorough asessment of the quality of all satellite records on upper tropospheric and stratospheric water vapour available in the period 2000 to 2016. Besides a validation against ground-truth reference data records, the intercomparison of the satellite records to assess their consistency is an important step. More results from the WAVAS-II activity can be found in the ACP/AMT/ESSD special issue: https://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/special_issue10_830.html

For more information about this paper see: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-2693-2019