Empirical relationship between sea surface temperature and water vapor: Improvement of the physical model with remote sensing derived data

We have improved the previous model quantifying the bulk relationship between two key geophysical parameters, sea surface temperature (SST) and water vapor (WV) based on 14-year accumulated datasets. This improvement is achieved by the modification of the physical model derived by Stephens in 1990 and Gaffen et al. in 1992. With this improved model, we estimated WV between 2002 and 2004 using historical SST measurements. The estimated WV was compared with those derived from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) observation and National Centers for Environmental Predictions (NCEP) reanalysis. Discrepancies of −1.16 mm and 3.19 mm with TMI-and NCEP-derived WV were obtained, respectively, suggesting a reliable retrieval of WV using the improved model. The improved model can potentially be used to calibrate and validate the WV measurements from other observations or model reanalyses, given that the accurate measurement of WV over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales has been a challenging task hitherto. Due to the limited time span of the current data, the temporal variation of WV in parts of the tropical oceans is not captured in this improved model, which we should study further with additional accumulation of SST and WV datasets in the future.