Seminar Ozean, Eis, Atmosphäre

WATS is a candidate for the ESA core missions. The novel part of the proposed measurement concept is to perform active microwave limb sounding between low Earth orbit satellites with highly stable transmitters/receivers, making it possible to determine the atmospheric limb transmission. WATS will have three channels inside the range 10-32 GHz. The results from a first study on the retrieval performance for the transmissions observations will be presented. An important advantage of WATS is its capability to make highly accurate measurements of water vapor in the presence of clouds, on the same time as the amount of liquid clouds is estimated. It is notewhorty that scattering can be neglected in the absence of rain. The error budget is in general dominated by spectroscopic uncertainties and existing absorption parameterizations for the frequency range have been reviewed carefully.