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

The main objective of this work is to provide accurate error estimates for the different water vapour profiling sensors based on an intensive inter‐comparison effort. The inter‐comparison, performed in the framework of COPS—Convective and Orographically‐induced Precipitation Study (01 June–31 August 2007), involves airborne and ground‐based water vapour lidar systems, radiosondes with different humidity sensors, GPS and Microwave radiometers (MWR). Simultaneous and co‐located data from different sensors are used to compute relative bias and root‐mean square (RMS) deviations as a function of altitude.