ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-9-17903-2009 On the quality of the Nimbus 7 LIMS Version 6 water vapor profiles and distributions Remsberg E. E. 1 Natarajan M. 1 Lingenfelser G. S. 2 Thompson R. E. 3 Marshall B. T. 3 Gordley L. L. 3 NASA Langley Res. Center, 21 Langley Blvd., Mail Stop 401B, Hampton, VA 23681, USA SSAI, 1 Enterprise Parkway, Hampton, VA 23661, USA GATS, Inc., 11864 Canon Blvd., Suite 101, Newport News, VA 23606, USA 01 09 2009 9 5 17903 17935 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/17903/2009/acpd-9-17903-2009.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/17903/2009/acpd-9-17903-2009.pdf

This report describes the quality of the Nimbus 7 Limb Infrared Monitor of the Stratosphere (LIMS) water vapor (H<sub>2</sub>O) profiles of 1978/1979 that were processed with a Version 6 (V6) algorithm and archived in 2002. The V6 profiles incorporate a better knowledge of the instrument attitude for the LIMS measurements along its orbits, leading to improvements for its temperature profiles and for the registration of its water vapor radiances with pressure. As a result, the LIMS V6 zonal-mean distributions of H<sub>2</sub>O exhibit better hemispheric symmetry than was the case from the original Version 5 (V5) dataset that was archived in 1982. Estimates of the precision and accuracy of the V6 H<sub>2</sub>O profiles are developed and provided. Individual profiles have a precision of order 5% and an estimated accuracy of about 19% at 3 hPa, 14% at 10 hPa, and 26% at 50 hPa. Profile segments within about 2 km of the tropopause are often affected by emissions from clouds that appear in the finite field-of-view of the detector for the LIMS H<sub>2</sub>O channel. Zonally-averaged distributions of the LIMS V6 H<sub>2</sub>O are compared with those from the more recent Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) satellite experiment for November, February, and May of 2004/2005. The patterns and values of their respective distributions are similar in many respects. Effects of a strengthened Brewer-Dobson circulation are indicated in the MLS distributions of the recent decade versus those of LIMS from 1978/1979. A tropical tape recorder signal is present in the 7-month time series of LIMS V6 H<sub>2</sub>O with lowest values in February 1979, and the estimated, annually-averaged "entry-level" H<sub>2</sub>O is 3.5 to 3.8 ppmv. It is judged that this historic LIMS water vapor dataset is of good quality for studies of the near global-scale chemistry and transport for pressure levels from 3 hPa to about 70 to 100 hPa.

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