ALBERT

Description: Mesospheric water vapour has been observed above ALOMAR in northern Norway (69° N 16° E) by our group since 1995 using a 22 GHz ground based microwave spectrometer. A new instrument with higher sensitivity, providing a much better time resolution especially in the upper mesosphere, was installed in May 2008. The time resolution is high enough to provide observations of daily variations in the water vapour mixing ratio. We present the first ground based detections of tidal behaviour in the polar middle atmospheric water vapour distribution. Diurnal and semidiurnal variations of water vapour have been observed and due to the long chemical lifetime of water they are assumed to be caused by changing wind patterns which transport water-rich or poor air into the observed region. The detected tidal behaviour does not follow any single other dynamical field but is instead assumed to be a result of the different wind components. Both the diurnal and semidiurnal amplitude and phase components are resolved. The former shows a stable seasonal behaviour consistent with earlier observations of wind fields and model calculations, whereas the latter appears more complex and no regular behaviour has so far been observed.

Description: Mesospheric water vapour has been observed above ALOMAR in Northern Norway (69° N 16° E) by our group since 1995 using a 22 GHz ground-based microwave spectrometer. A new instrument with higher sensitivity, providing a much better time resolution especially in the upper mesosphere, was installed in May 2008. The time resolution is high enough to provide observations of daily variations in the water vapour mixing ratio. We present the first ground-based detections of tidal behaviour in the polar middle atmospheric water vapour distribution. Daily variations of water vapour have been observed and due to the long chemical lifetime of water they are assumed to be caused by changing wind patterns which transport water-rich or poor air into the observed region. The detected tidal behaviour does not follow any single other dynamical field but is instead assumed to be a result of the different wind components. Both the diurnal and semidiurnal amplitude and phase components are resolved. The former shows a stable seasonal behaviour consistent with earlier observations of wind fields and model calculations, whereas the latter appears more complex and no regular behaviour has so far been observed.

Description: This paper presents the Alpine Radiometer Intercomparison at the Schneefernerhaus (ARIS), which took place in winter 2009 at the high altitude station at the Zugspitze, Germany (47.42° N, 10.98° E, 2650 m). This campaign was the first direct intercomparison between three new ground based 22 GHz water vapor radiometers for middle atmospheric profiling with the following instruments participating: MIRA 5 (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), cWASPAM3 (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau) and MIAWARA-C (Institute of Applied Physics, University of Bern). Even though the three radiometers all measure middle atmospheric water vapor using the same rotational transition line and similar fundamental set-ups, there are major differences between the front-ends, the backends, the calibration concepts and the profile retrieval. The spectrum comparison shows that all three radiometers measure spectra without severe baseline artifacts and that the measurements are in good general agreement. The measurement noise shows good agreement to the values theoretically expected from the radiometer noise formula. At the same time the comparison of the noise levels shows that there is room for instrumental and calibration improvement, emphasizing the importance of low elevation angles for the observation, a low receiver noise temperature and an efficient calibration scheme. The comparisons of the retrieved profiles show that the agreement between the profiles of MIAWARA-C and cWASPAM3 with the ones of MLS is better than 0.3 ppmv at all altitudes. MIRA 5 has a dry bias of approximately 0.5 ppm below 0.1 hPa with respect to all other instruments. The profiles of cWASPAM3 and MIAWARA-C could not be directly compared because the vertical region of overlap was too small. The comparison of the time series at different altitude levels show a similar evolution of the H2O volume mixing ratio (VMR) for the ground based instruments as well as the space borne sensor MLS.

Description: This paper presents the Alpine Radiometer Intercomparison at the Schneefernerhaus (ARIS), which took place in winter 2009 at the high altitude station at the Zugspitze, Germany (47.42° N, 10.98° E, 2650 m). This campaign was the first direct intercomparison between three new ground based 22 GHz water vapor radiometers for middle atmospheric profiling with the following instruments participating: MIRA 5 (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), cWASPAM3 (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau) and MIAWARA-C (Institute of Applied Physics, University of Bern). Even though the three radiometers all measure middle atmospheric water vapor using the same rotational transition line and similar fundamental set-ups, there are major differences between the front ends, the back ends, the calibration concepts and the profile retrieval. The spectrum comparison shows that all three radiometers measure spectra without severe baseline artifacts and that the measurements are in good general agreement. The measurement noise shows good agreement to the values theoretically expected from the radiometer noise formula. At the same time the comparison of the noise levels shows that there is room for instrumental and calibration improvement, emphasizing the importance of low elevation angles for the observation, a low receiver noise temperature and an efficient calibration scheme. The comparisons of the retrieved profiles show that the agreement between the profiles of MIAWARA-C and cWASPAM3 with the ones of MLS is better than 0.3 ppmv (6%) at all altitudes. MIRA 5 has a dry bias of approximately 0.5 ppm (8%) below 0.1 hPa with respect to all other instruments. The profiles of cWASPAM3 and MIAWARA-C could not be directly compared because the vertical region of overlap was too small. The comparison of the time series at different altitude levels show a similar evolution of the H2O volume mixing ratio (VMR) for the ground based instruments as well as the space borne sensor MLS.

Description: We have developed a new, high time-resolution, microwave heterodyne spectrometer for observations of water vapour in the middle atmosphere. It measures the rotational transition of water vapour at 22.235 GHz in the vertical and horizontal polarisation. The two polarisations are averaged in order to optimise the signal-to-noise ratio. The different polarisations have separate, but identical, signal chains consisting of a 22 GHz cooled HEMT amplifier, a second, warm, 22 GHz HEMT booster amplifier, an IF stage and a Chirp Transform Spectrometer (CTS) backend. Continuous calibration with two internal loads kept at temperatures close to the observed atmosphere, a wobbling optical table to reduce standing waves in the optical path and the low receiver temperature ensures a time resolution of an order of magnitude better than what has been achieved by earlier instruments. The error sources in the retrieved spectrum are discussed and the data is compared and validated against EOS-MLS on the NASA Aura satellite. The profiles are found to be in good agreement with each other.

Description: We have been observing the water vapour line at 22.235 GHz above ALOMAR in northern Norway (69° N, 16° E) since early 1996 with ground-based microwave spectrometers (WASPAM and cWASPAM) and will here describe a climatology based on these observations. Maintenance, different spectrometers and upgrades of the hardware have slightly changed the instruments. Therefore great care has been taken to make sure the different datasets are compatible with each other. In order to maximise the sensitivity at high altitude for the older instrument a long integration time (168 h) was chosen. The complete dataset was thereafter recompiled into a climatology which describes the yearly variation of water vapour at polar latitudes on a weekly basis. The atmosphere is divided into 16 layers between 40–80 km, each 2.5 km thick. The dataset, spanning 15 yr from 1996 to 2010, enabled us to investigate the long-term behaviour of water vapour at these latitudes. By comparing the measurements from every year to the climatological mean we were also able to look for indications of trends in the dataset at different altitudes during the time period of our observations. In general there is a weak negative trend which differs slightly at different altitudes. There are however no drifts in the annual variation of water vapour from the point of view of onset of summer and winter. We compare our climatology to the reference water vapour profiles from AFGL, a free and easy accessible reference atmosphere. There are strong deviations between our observations and the reference profile, therefore we publish our climatological dataset in a table in the paper.