SCIAMACHY water vapour retrieval

Global water vapour column amounts have been derived for the first time from measurements of the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHar-tographY (SCIAMACHY) on the European environmental satellite ENVISAT. For this purpose, two different existing retrieval algorithms have been adapted, namely the Air 5 Mass Corrected Differential Absorption Spectroscopy (AMC-DOAS) which was originally designed for GOME and the Weighting Function Modified Differential Absorption Spectroscopy (WFM-DOAS) which was mainly designed for the retrieval of CH 4 , CO 2 and CO from SCIAMACHY near-infrared spectra. Here, both methods have been applied to SCIAMACHY's nadir measurements in the near-visible spectral region around 10 700 nm. The results of these two methods agree within a scatter of ±0.5 g/cm 2 with corresponding SSM/I and ECMWF water vapour data. This deviation includes contributions from the temporal and spatial variability of water vapour. In fact, the mean deviation between the SCIAMACHY and the correlative data sets is much smaller: the SCIA-15 MACHY total water vapour columns are typically about 0.2 g/cm 2 lower than the SSM/I values and less than 0.1 g/cm 2 lower than corresponding ECMWF data. The SCIA-MACHY water vapour results agree well with correlative data not only over ocean but also over land, thus showing the capability of SCIAMACHY to derive water vapour concentrations on the global scale.