The Environmental Physics Laboratory (Ephyslab) of CIM-UVigo, co-financed by the FEDER/FSE Galicia Operational Programme 2014-2020, has recently joined the European Space Agency’s working group on water vapour in the atmosphere. Formed by eleven research teams from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium and Canada, the Water Vapour CCI aims to generate new global records of high-quality climate data in its field, considering that “water vapour is fundamental to understanding past, present and future climate change and to determining its global and regional impacts”.
Based in the Campus da Auga building on the Ourense campus, the Ephyslab team that will participate in this consortium is led by Luis Gimeno and Raquel Nieto and completed by postdoctoral researcher Jorge Eiras. According to the research group, Water Vapour is part of the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI), whose objective is to “realize the best global long-term Earth observation database that the European Space Agency, together with its member states, have established in the last 40 years, as a significant contribution to the databases required by the United Nations Convention on Climate Change.”
Evaluate the data
In the context of the Climate Change Initiative, Ephyslab points out, “the ultimate goal of Water Vapour is to generate new global records of high-quality climate data of water vapor in the atmosphere, which are homogeneous in space and time, and which meet the requirements of the Global Climate Observing System and respond in the best possible way to the needs of users in the climate studies community”. This group will also “optimize the temporal and spatial resolution of these data records with respect to the assessed limitations of the available observation systems and quantify uncertainties useful to end users”. In addition, the Water Vapour CCI also has the challenge of analyzing climate variability and trends in atmospheric water vapor on different time scales and the coherence between observations and theoretical expectations, in order to advance the scientific understanding of the importance of water vapor in the climate system and to support climate services.
Ephyslab’s specific role in the Water Vapour CCI will consist of evaluating “the water vapor data generated by other members of the consortium to characterize the moisture profile transported by atmospheric rivers and low-level jets, meteorological systems in which we have extensive experience”. Thus, Gimeno and Nieto recall, “for more than a decade we have been working to understand the transport of water vapor in the atmosphere, studying its average behavior and its extremes”. As a result of this experience, they indicate, their group was proposed to become part of Water Vapour. “For us it is a very positive and rewarding experience to be able to link our work to the validation of this new water vapor database, since all the data must be validated and contrasted in order to be released to the scientific community and used for new research”, comment the Ephyslab researchers. The creation of databases from satellites, they clarify, “is not our field of work, but its use in different ways is. In recent years, our research has focused on the branch of the hydrological cycle in the atmosphere and therefore we are knowledgeable about the management of water vapor data.”
Key component of the terrestrial hydrological cycle
Water vapor in the atmosphere, comment Luis Gimeno and Raquel Nieto, “is a key component of the Earth’s hydrological cycle, critical for shaping the global environment and supporting life on Earth as we know it.” Water vapor, they add, also plays a fundamental role in constraining the Earth’s energy balance. “It is the single most important natural greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and constitutes a strong positive feedback against the anthropogenically modified climate by excess carbon dioxide,” comment the researchers. It is because of its importance that the Global Climate Observing System has identified water vapor as an essential climate variable, emphasize the Ephyslab experts.
However, explain the researchers from the Ourense campus, “the properties of the distribution of atmospheric water vapor on Earth challenge not only climate research, but also the science of Earth observation, from the development of instruments to the sciences that recover and use them”. In this framework, they point out, the Water Vapour CCI project of the European Space Agency to which they now join “will help consolidate knowledge of past changes derived from satellite observations and establish climate data records for use in climate research”.
Source: DUVI
