Continuous time series of water vapor profiles from a combination of Raman lidar and microwave radiometer

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method to retrieve continuous water vapor profiles from a combination of a Raman lidar and a microwave radiometer. The integrated water vapor from the microwave radiometer is used to calibrate the Raman lidar operationally resulting in small biases compared to radiosondes. The height limitations for Raman lidars (cloud base and daylight contamination) can be well compensated by the application of a two–step algorithm combining the Raman lidars mass mixing ratio and the microwave radiometers brightness temperatures.