Temperature-dependent daily variability of precipitable water in special sensor microwave/imager observations

We use retrievals of atmospheric precipitable water from satellite microwave observations and analyses of near-surface temperature to examine the relationship between these two fields on daily and longer time scales. The retrieval technique producing the data used here is most effective over the open ocean, so the analysis focuses on the southern hemisphere's extratropics, which have an extensive ocean surface. For both the total and the eddy precipitable water fields, there is a close correspondence between local variations in the precipitable water and near-surface temperature. The correspondence appears particularly strong for synoptic and planetary scale transient eddies. More specifically, the results support a typical modeling assumption that transient eddy moisture fields are proportional to transient eddy temperature fields under the assumption f constant relative humidity.