The GEWEX water vapor assessment archive of water vapour products from satellites and reanalyses

The GEWEX Data and Assessments Panel (GDAP) initiated the GEWEX Water Vapor Assessment (G-VAP) which has the main objectives
to quantify the current state of art in water vapour products being constructed for climate applications and to support the
selection process of suitable water vapour products by GDAP for its production of globally consistent water and energy cycle
products. During the construction of the G-VAP data archive freely available and mature satellite and reanalysis data records
with a minimum temporal coverage of ten years were considered. The data archive contains total column water vapour as well
as specific humidity and temperature at four pressure levels (1000, 700, 500, 300 hPa). The following data records are
elements of the G-VAP archive: AIRWAVE, AMSR-E (JAXA, REMSS), ATOVS, CFSR, EMiR, ERA-20C, ERA-Interim, GOME/SCIAMACHY/GOME2,
HOAPS, JRA-55, MERIS, MERRA, MERRA2, MODIS-AQUA, NVAP-M (Ocean, Climate), REMSS, SSM/I+MERIS, and TMI (further details
at http://www.gewex-vap.org/?page_id=309). All data records were remapped to a regular longitude/latitude grid of 2°x2°.
The data archive consists of four different folders: 22 TCWV data records covering the period 2003-2008, 11 TCWV data records
covering the period 1988-2008 as well as seven specific humidity and seven temperature data records covering the period
1988-2009. Besides comprehensive metadata the files contain spatio-temporal averages of TCWV in units of kg/m2, of
specific humidity in units of g/kg and of temperature in units of K.

The data is available at http://gewex-vap.org/?page_id=969.