Climatology of middle atmospheric water vapour above the ALOMAR observatory in northern Norway

Abstract. We have been observing the water vapour line at 22.235 GHz above ALOMAR in northern Norway (69° N, 16° E) since early 1996 with ground-based microwave spectrometers (WASPAM and cWASPAM) and will here describe a climatology based on these observations. Maintenance, different spectrometers and upgrades of the hardware have slightly changed the instruments. Therefore great care has been taken to make sure the different datasets are compatible with each other. In order to maximise the sensitivity at high altitude for the older instrument a long integration time (168 h) was chosen. The complete dataset was thereafter recompiled into a climatology which describes the yearly variation of water vapour at polar latitudes on a weekly basis. The atmosphere is divided into 16 layers between 40–80 km, each 2.5 km thick. The dataset, spanning 15 yr from 1996 to 2010, enabled us to investigate the long-term behaviour of water vapour at these latitudes. By comparing the measurements from every year to the climatological mean we were also able to look for indications of trends in the dataset at different altitudes during the time period of our observations. In general there is a weak negative trend which differs slightly at different altitudes. There are however no drifts in the annual variation of water vapour from the point of view of onset of summer and winter. We compare our climatology to the reference water vapour profiles from AFGL, a free and easy accessible reference atmosphere. There are strong deviations between our observations and the reference profile, therefore we publish our climatological dataset in a table in the paper.