Importance of the Saharan heat low in controlling the North Atlantic free tropospheric humidity budget deduced from IASI <i>δ</i>D observations

Lacour, Jean-Lionel; Flamant, Cyrille; Risi, Camille; Clerbaux, Cathy; Coheur, Pierre-François

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9645-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9645-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9645-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

Research article

|

10 Aug 2017

Research article |

| 10 Aug 2017

Importance of the Saharan heat low in controlling the North Atlantic free tropospheric humidity budget deduced from IASI δD observations

Jean-Lionel Lacour, Cyrille Flamant, Camille Risi, Cathy Clerbaux, and Pierre-François Coheur

Data sets

TES data NASA https://tes.jpl.nasa.gov/data/

MERRA data GES DISC https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/

ECMWF re-analysis ECMWF http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/

Short summary

We present temporal and spatial δD distributions derived from IASI obtained above the North Atlantic in the vicinity of West Africa. We show that the seasonality of δD in the North Atlantic is closely associated with the influence of the Saharan heat low (SHL). We provide an interpretation of the temporal and spatial variations in δD and show that the interactions between the large-scale subsidence, the ITCZ, and the SHL can be disentangled thanks to the added information contained in δD.