Determination of precipitable water from solar transmission

Abstract

A method of determining precipitable water to within 10% from solar radiometer data has been developed. The method uses a modified Langley technique to obtain the water vapor optical depth, and a model developed at the University of Arizona is used to convert this to a precipitable water amount. The method is applied to two- and three-channel radiometric data and is compared to results obtained from empirical methods and to radiosonde data. -Authors