Description
(Text)
The importance of water vapor in Earths atmosphere cannot be understated. It is an active green-house gas, important energy conveyer in the troposhere and a key element in many chemical reactions in the middle atmosphere. Yet, there are still many questions concerning the water vapor dynamics in the middle atmosphere. This thesis present a new, state-of-the art, microwave instrument developed in order to shed light on some of these issues. The high sensitivity and time-resolution enable us to resolve fast dynamical events which was not possible before. Furthermore it expands an already long dataset and a mean vertical distribution of water vapor for polar latitudes is presented.
(Extract)
The work conducted for this thesis demanded knowledge of two separate disciplines; initially microwave spectroscopy and the involved instrumentation and thereafter atmospheric physics with a focus on the middle atmosphere in order to correctly analyze the retrieved data. In this first chapter I will therefore give a short introduction to the most important concepts relevant to each field. The first part will touch upon the relations and physics that enable us to retrieve a vertical distribution profile of water vapor in the atmosphere by means of microwave spectroscopy. In the next part I will introduce some terms and definitions which are used in Chapter 3 to describe the new instrument. The last part is intended to give the reader a general background to the middle atmosphere, and to present some important processes in the middle atmosphere relevant for water vapor and transport of tracers.
