Articles | Volume 9, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-1207-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-1207-2016
Research article
 | 
21 Mar 2016
Research article |  | 21 Mar 2016

Intercomparison of in situ water vapor balloon-borne measurements from Pico-SDLA H2O and FLASH-B in the tropical UTLS

Mélanie Ghysels, Emmanuel D. Riviere, Sergey Khaykin, Clara Stoeffler, Nadir Amarouche, Jean-Pierre Pommereau, Gerhard Held, and Georges Durry

Abstract. In this paper we compare water vapor mixing ratio measurements from two quasi-parallel flights of the Pico-SDLA H2O and FLASH-B hygrometers. The measurements were made on 10 February 2013 and 13 March 2012, respectively, in the tropics near Bauru, São Paulo state, Brazil during an intense convective period. Both flights were performed as part of a French scientific project, TRO-Pico, to study the impact of the deep-convection overshoot on the water budget. Only a few instruments that permit the frequent sounding of stratospheric water vapor can be flown within small-volume weather balloons. Technical difficulties preclude the accurate measurement of stratospheric water vapor with conventional in situ techniques. The instruments described here are simple and lightweight, which permits their low-cost deployment by non-specialists aboard a small weather balloon. We obtain mixing ratio retrievals which agree above the cold-point tropopause to within 1.9 and 0.5 % for the first and second flights, respectively. This level of agreement for balloon-borne measured stratospheric water mixing ratio constitutes one of the best agreement reported in the literature. Because both instruments show similar profiles within their combined uncertainties, we conclude that the Pico-SDLA H2O and FLASH-B data sets are mutually consistent.

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Short summary
Water vapor in the Earth stratosphere has a significant impact on the climate and the radiative balance. Achieving high-accuracy measurements of humidity in the stratosphere is still far from routine. In this paper, we demonstrate one of the best in situ balloon-borne measurement comparisons from two highly compact spectrometers: Pico-SDLA H2O and FLASH-B.