A Compact and Low Resolution Spectrometer for the Inversion of Water Vapor Total Column Amounts

摘要

Observations of atmospheric water vapor (H_2O) amounts are required for the investigation of important and current atmospheric studies, such as the hydrological cycle, energy balance, climate change, etc. In this context, we present a portable, very compact, commercial and very low resolution Fourier transform spectrometer for the remote sensing of total column amounts of H_2O at a high measurement frequency (one measurement about every 2 minutes). The methodology applied to carry out this work is explained. Moreover, first results are compared with high quality H_2O total column amounts obtained by a collocated non-mobile high resolution Fourier transform spectrometer. This inter-comparison documents that the very low resolution instrument is well suited for capturing the variability of H_2O total column amounts (with precision better than 4%), but that suffers from a significant wet bias (about 30%).