Study of the hydrological cycle using new satellite-borne isotope measurements

Samuel Jonson Sutanto

Transport of water vapor through the atmosphere is crucial importance for life on earth and for climate. Water vapor provides rainwater to the continents, transports large amounts of energy from the tropics to higher latitudes, forms clouds and ice sheets, which are important for the radiance balance of the earth, and is itself the most important greenhouse gas. Therefore, the water cycle is studied in detail. In recent years, possible changes to the hydrological cycle in response to global warming have been scrutinized. Detailed information about transport and the condensation history of water is available from isotope measurements. The IMAU-SRON group of applicants has recently succeeded to retrieval global scale HDO data from the SCIAMACHY instrument on ENVISAT which is particular sensitive to water in the lowest atmospheric layer.

The goal of this project is to analyze and interpret of the spatial and temporal variations of HDO dataset from satellites and global climate model and to improve the representation of the hydrological cycle in global climate model using the satellites data.