Cédric Champollion

On the use of GPS tomography to investigate water vapor variability during a Mistral/sea breeze event in southeastern France

Global Positioning System (GPS) tomography analyses of water vapor, complemented by high-resolution numerical simulations are used to investigate a Mistral/sea breeze event in the region of Marseille, France, during the ESCOMPTE experiment. This is the first time GPS tomography has been used to validate the three-dimensional water vapor concentration from numerical simulation, and to analyze a small-scale meteorological event. The high spatial and temporal resolution of GPS analyses provides a unique insight into the evolution of the vertical and horizontal distribution of water vapor during the Mistral/sea-breeze transition.

GPS zenith delay sensitivity evaluated from high-resolution numerical weather prediction simulations of the 8–9 September 2002 flash flood over southeastern France

Estimations of zenith total delays (ZTD) were obtained during postprocessing of a high-resolution (2.4 km) nonhydrostatic atmospheric model (Meso-NH). These estimations were used to determine their sensitivity with respect to formulations of atmospheric refractivity, the approximation of zenith hydrostatic delays (ZHD) deduced from ground pressure, and the contributions of hydrometeors. The factor k for the conversion of zenith wet delay (ZWD) to integrated water vapor (IWV) was examined. Meso-NH is applied here to the extreme flash flood event of 8–9 September 2002 in southeastern France. The use of the hydrostatic formulation (to infer ZHD) leads to an overestimation of up to 18 mm with respect to the vertical integration of refractivity. Delay contributions of hydrometeors simulated by the high-resolution model reached more than 70 mm (%11 kg/m 2 IWV) in the heart of the convective cells in the case of the extreme flood event. The mean variations of IWV due to the use of different conversion factors (k used to transform ZWD to IWV) are evaluated to be less than 0.3 kg/m 2. This is less than the mean underestimation of IWV by 0.6 kg/m 2 relative to the GPS-like evaluation of IWV using the hydrostatic formulation and the ground temperature. In this study we also use GPS ZTD observations to validate three different numerical simulations of this extreme flood event. The simulation with the best fit to the GPS observations is also in best agreement with the surface rainfall measurements.

The European Comparison of Absolute Gravimeters 2011 (ECAG-2011) in Walferdange, Luxembourg: results and recommendations

We present the results of the third European Comparison of Absolute Gravimeters held in Walferdange, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in November 2011. Twenty-two gravimeters from both metrological and non-metrological institutes are compared. For the first time, corrections for the laser beam diffraction and the self-attraction of the gravimeters are implemented. The gravity observations are also corrected for geophysical gravity changes that occurred during the comparison using the observations of a superconducting gravimeter. We show that these corrections improve the degree of equivalence between the gravimeters. We present the results for two different combinations of data. In the first one, we use only the observations from the metrological institutes. In the second solution, we include all the data from both metrological and non-metrological institutes. Those solutions are then compared with the official result of the comparison published previously and based on the observations of the metrological institutes and the gravity differences at the different sites as measured by non-metrological institutes. Overall, the absolute gravity meters agree with one another with a standard deviation of 3.1 µGal. Finally, the results of this comparison are linked to previous ones. We conclude with some important recommendations for future comparisons.

Comparison of IASI water vapour products over complex terrain with COPS campaign data

In this work, we compare IASI-retrieved vertical water vapour profiles and related precipitable water over a complex region, namely the Rhine Valley area, during the pre-operational period of IASI exploitation (June?August 2007). Both IASI water vapour mixing ratio profiles and integrated water vapour content are retrieved from L1C radiances spectra using two techniques and compared with water vapour related observations acquired during the Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) field campaign that took place in this area at that time (i.e. lidars, radiosoundings and a global positioning system - GPS - station network). This work addresses the issue of IASI vertical spatial resolution and its capability to detect two-layer water vapour structures such as those observed in a mountainous area and which play an important role in convective initiation or inhibition. We found that this capability mostly relies on the type of a-priori background vector (climatology or space-time colocated ECMWF analysis), which is used within the retrieval scheme. Systematic comparison of water vapour products derived from 71 IASI spectra confirms that IASI can retrieve water vapour amounts in 2 km width layers, in the lower troposphere, with an accuracy of approximately 10%.

Impact of ambient temperature on spring-based relative gravimeter measurements

In this paper, we investigate the impact of ambient temperature changes on the gravity reading of spring-based relative gravimeters. Controlled heating experiments using two Scintrex CG5 gravimeters allowed us to determine a linear correlation (R

Water vapour intercomparison effort in the frame of the Convective and Orographically‐induced Precipitation Study

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GPS water vapour tomography: preliminary results from the ESCOMPTE field experiment

2> 0.9) between ambient temperature and gravity variations. The relation is stable and constant for the two CG5 we used: −5 nm/s