A33E-0218
Validation of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's OMI Water Vapor Product

Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Huiqun Wang1, Gonzalo Gonzalez Abad2, Xiong Liu2 and Kelly Chance3, (1)Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA, United States, (2)Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, United States, (3)Harvard-Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, United States
Abstract:
We perform a comprehensive validation of SAO’s OMI water vapor product. The SAO OMI water vapor slant column is retrieved using the 430 – 480 nm wavelength range. In addition to water vapor, the retrieval considers O3, NO2, liquid water, O4, C2H2O2, the Ring effect, water ring, 3rd order polynomial, common mode and under-sampling. The slant column is converted to vertical column using AMF. AMF is calculated using GEOS-Chem water vapor profile shape, OMCLDO2 cloud information and OMLER surface albedo information. We validate our product using NCAR’s GPS network data over the world and RSS’s gridded microwave data over the ocean. We also compare our product with the total precipitable water derived from the AERONET ground-based sun photometer data, the GlobVapour gridded product, and other datasets. We investigate the influence of sub-grid scale variability and filtering criteria on the comparison. We study the influence of clouds, aerosols and a priori profiles on the retrieval. We also assess the long-term performance and stability of our product and seek ways to improve it.