An Assessment of Upper Tropospheric Water Vapor in the MERRA-2 Reanalysis: Comparisons with MLS and In Situ Water Vapor Measurements

Henry B Selkirk1,2, Andrea Molod3,4, Steven Pawson3, Anne R Douglass2, Holger Voemel5, Dale F Hurst6,7, Jonathan H. Jiang8, William G Read9, Michael J Schwartz10 and Michael Manyin2,11, (1)GESTAR, Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Laboratory for Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)University of Maryland College Park, ESSIC, College Park, MD, United States, (5)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division, Boulder, CO, United States, (8)California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (9)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (10)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (11)Science Systems and Applications, Inc., Lanham, MD, United States