Monitoring of water vapor from space is a difficult task due to the strong spatial variabilityof WV and its complex spectroscopic structure. Until about the turn of the century only a verylimited number of instruments such as SSMI or TOVS were able to provide total column water vapor measurements on a global scale and for sufficiently long time series. Data from these instruments have therefore been operationally assimilated in ECMWF and NCEP forecasts and re-analysisdata sets. However, both of the instruments have certain restrictions. The SSMI microwave sounder measures solely over ocean surfaces and TOVS, which measures emitted thermal radiation, is especially sensitive to the middle and upper troposphere. This lack of lower tropospheric sensitivity introduces some bias in the retrieved total columns. GOME on ERS-2 measures absorptions of water vapor from backscattered solar radiation in three absorption bands in the visible partof the spectrum and therefore serves not only as one of the few alternative sources to the aforementioned instruments for the period between 1995 and the beginning of the new millennium - comprising a 9-year water vapor data record - but is also capable of measuring over all surface types with a sufficient sensitivity to the lower and middle part of the troposphere for accurate column retrievals. We use the GOME water vapor record, which will be extended by the GOME instrument series on the METop satellites, together with profile information from the operational radiosonde network for evaluations of modelled water vapor fields in Chemistry Transport Models (CTM) like MATCH-MPIC and General Circulation Models (GCM) like ECHAM 5. We demonstrate that monthly and yearly averages of a good part of the 9-year GOME record can be used successfully for climate and chemistry model evaluation. We further show that satellite date used synergistically with water vapor profile information from the radiosonde network may successfully be used as proxy data-set in climate change studies.