A curiosity regarding the relation between surface level humidity and precipitable water

✍ Scribed by N. Gautam; Sujit Basu; R. M. Gairola; P. C. Pandey

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 262 KB
• Volume: 60
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-8314
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00122067

✦ Synopsis

We have examined the global relation betwen the mean monthly surface level humidity and the precipitable water (Q-W relation) developed by Liu (1986) for its applicability to instantaneous data sets as proposed by Hsu and Blanchard (1989) Over the Indian oceanic region. Our analysis using regional instantaneous values of W from Monex-79 in-situ data sets gave an rmz error of 5.66 gm/kg. This is considerably larger than the rms error of 0.4 gm/kg as obtained by Liu using the global mean monthly relation, thus failing to support Hsu and Blanchard's conjecture. However, a fifth-order polynomial in W derived by us based on instantaneous data indicates an rms error of 0.92 gm/kg.