Atmospheric water vapor amounts retrieved from GOME satellite data

Abstract
A new method for the retrieval of global atmospheric vertical column amounts of water vapor from measurements of the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) is presented. The method is based on a modified Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) approach, taking into account the effects arising from strong wavelength dependent absorptions. In this paper the feasibility of this approach is demonstrated and first estimates on the retrieval precision and the accuracy of the H2O data product are given by comparison with selected Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) data.