Tropospheric Water Vapor Transport as Determined from Airborne Lidar Measurements

Abstract

The first collocated measurements during THORPEX (The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment) regional campaign in Europe in 2007 were performed by a novel four-wavelength differential absorption lidar and a scanning 2-mmDoppler wind lidar on board the research aircraft Falcon of the Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR). One mission that was characterized by exceptionally high data coverage (47% for the specific humidity q and 63% for the horizontal wind speed) was selected to calculate the advective transport of atmospheric moisture along a 1600-km section in the warm sector of an extratropical cyclone. The observations are compared with special 1-hourly model data calculated by the ECMWF integrated forecast system. Along the cross section, the model underestimates the wind speed on average by 2.8% (0.6 m/s) and overestimates the moisture at dry layers and in the boundary layer, which results in a wet bias of 17.1% (0.2 g/kg). Nevertheless, the ECMWF model reproduces quantitatively the horizontally averaged moisture transport in the warm sector. There, the superposition of high low-level humidity and the increasing wind velocities with height resulted in a deep tropospheric layer of enhanced water vapor transport. The observed moisture transport is variable and possesses a maximum of 130 g/kg m/s in the lower troposphere. The pathways of the moisture transport from southwest via several branches of different geographical origin are identified by Lagrangian trajectories and by high values of the vertically averaged tropospheric moisture transport.