• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.53-68
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• 1998

Observation of hydrometeors' behavior in the atmosphere is important to understand weather and climate. By conventional observations, we can get the distribution of water vapor at limited number of points on the earth. In this study, the precipitable water has been estimated from the split window channel data on GMS-5 based upon the technique developed by Chesters et al.(1983). To retrieve the precipitable water, water vapor absorption parameter depending on filter function of sensor has been derived using the regression analysis between the split window channel data and the radiosonde data observed at Osan, Pohang, Kwangiu and Cheju staions for 4 months. The air temperature of 700 hPa from the Global Spectral Model of Korea Meteorological Administration (GSM/KMA) has been used as mean air temperature for single layer radiation model. The retrieved precipitable water for the period from August 1996 through December 1996 are compared to radiosonde data. It is shown that the root mean square differences between radiosonde observations and the GMS-5 retrievals range from 0.65 g/$cm^2$ to 1.09 g/$cm^2$ with correlation coefficient of 0.46 on hourly basis. The monthly distribution of precipitable water from GMS-5 shows almost good representation in large scale. Precipitable water is produced 4 times a day at Korea Meteorological Administration in the form of grid point data with 0.5 degree lat./lon. resolution. The data can be used in the objective analysis for numerical weather prediction and to increase the accuracy of humidity analysis especially under clear sky condition. And also, the data is a useful complement to existing data set for climatological research. But it is necessary to get higher correlation between radiosonde observations and the GMS-5 retrievals for operational applications.