Comparison of independent integrated water vapour estimates from GPS and sun photometer measurements and a meteorological model

Measurements using the Global Positioning System (GPS) are affected by the so-called tropospheric delay. Of this, the so-called wet delay is related mainly to the amount of water vapour along the path of the GPS signal through the troposphere. Precise knowledge of the abundance of water vapour, in space and time, is important for meteorology, both in forecasting and now-casting as well as in climate studies. Both because water vapour is the predecessor of precipitation, which is a forecast product, and because a very significant fraction of the energy released to the atmosphere comes from latent heat via water vapour. Despite the high variability of water vapour compared to other meteorological fields, like pressure and wind, water vapour observations are scarce; wherefore additional measurements of water vapour are expected to benefit meteorology. Water vapour is crucial for the development of the small scale, but sometimes very severe,precipitation events which are often seen at mid latitudes, and which are very hard to predict. In this work a comparison between radiometric (sun photometer) and GPS integrated water vapour (IWV) is presented. A sun photometer has been installed at the ENEA (Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente) base of Lampedusa Island. The sun photometer is quite close (less then 4 km) to an ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) GPS permanent receiver. In Venezia an ASI GPS permanent receiver is collocated with another sun photometer. Both sun photometers are installed as part of the AERONET (AErosol and Robotic NETwork) program. A long record of sun photometric measurements, GPS data, and meteorological data is available for the Venezia site. A shorter record (summer period of the year 2000) is available for the station at Lampedusa. The comparison among the three different methods for water vapour delay estimation is presented. We find that the GPS and sun photometric data are better correlated (S.D. about 10 mm for the wet delay) than are the measurements with the NWP model predictions. This is an indication that GPS delay data may contain information useful for weather prediction. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.