ADGEO Advances in Geosciences ADGEO Adv. Geosci. 1680-7359 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/adgeo-30-23-2011 Estimation of spatio-temporal distribution of precipitable water using MODIS and AVHRR data: a case study for Cyprus Hadjimitsis D. 1 Mitraka Z. 2 Gazani I. 2 Retalis A. 3 Chrysoulakis N. 2 Michaelides S. 4 Cyprus University of Technology, Department of Civil Engineering & Geomatics, Lemesos, Cyprus Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Greece National Observatory of Athens, Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development, Greece Cyprus Meteorological Service, Nicosia, Cyprus 09 05 2011 30 23 29 Copyright: © 2011 D. Hadjimitsis et al. 2011 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://adgeo.copernicus.org/articles/30/23/2011/adgeo-30-23-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://adgeo.copernicus.org/articles/30/23/2011/adgeo-30-23-2011.pdf

In this paper, the atmospheric precipitable water (PW) over the area of Cyprus was estimated by means of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) thermal channels brightness temperature difference (<i>&Delta;T</i>). The AVHRR derived <i>&Delta;T</i> was calculated in a grid of 5 × 5 km cells; the corresponding PW value in each grid cell was extracted from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Level 2 product (near-infrared algorithm). Once the PW – <i>&Delta;T</i> relationship coefficients corresponding to the area of Cyprus were calculated, the relationship was applied to AVHRR data for one month period. Radiosonde derived PW values, as well as MODIS independent PW values were used to validate the estimations and a good agreement was noted.

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