Seminar Ozean, Eis, Atmosphäre

Despite its importance to atmospheric processes over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, water vapour is one of the least understood and poorly described components of the Earth's atmosphere. No capability exists to date to measure this key variable with sufficient spatial resolution directly and globally from space.
The primary objective of WALES is to overcome these shortcomings and to achieve a mission that has the capability to routinely provide water vapour data suitable for a reliable assessment of the detailed temporal and spatial evolution of the global water vapour distribution. These analyses would lead to an improved description of climate processes in GCMs and to benefit in numerical weather prediction (NWP).
In the seminar the background scientific justification, the mission objectives and the observational requirements are discussed. The principle of measurement and the expected performance of WALES observations in terms of random and systematic errors, range resolution, horizontal integration length, and maximum vertical extent will be indicated. To highlight the along-track measurement capability of WALES, the results are compared with the expected performances of advanced infrared sounders such as AIRS and IASI.