The ESA GOME-Evolution “Climate” water vapor product: a homogenized time series of H₂O columns from GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2

Abstract

We present time series of the global distribution of water vapor columns over more than 2 decades based on measurements from the satellite instruments GOME, SCIAMACHY, and GOME-2 in the red spectral range. A particular focus is the consistency amongst the different sensors to avoid jumps from one instrument to another. This is reached by applying robust and simple retrieval settings consistently. Potentially systematic effects due to differences in ground pixel size are avoided by merging SCIAMACHY and GOME-2 observations to GOME spatial resolution, which also allows for a consistent treatment of cloud effects. In addition, the GOME-2 swath is reduced to that of GOME and SCIAMACHY to have consistent viewing geometries.Remaining systematic differences between the different sensors are investigated during overlap periods and are corrected for in the homogenized time series. The resulting Climate product v2.2 (https://doi.org/10.1594/WDCC/GOME-EVL_water_vapor_clim_v2.2) allows the study of the temporal evolution of water vapor over the last 20 years on a global scale.