On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:15:14 -0800 (PST), MET
wrote:

So estimate the "water content of the atmosphere" and post your answer.

Sorry, it's only now that I checked here again for an answer to my
initial question. (Since my question didn't get a reply for a while, I
actually lost hope to receive some help through this forum.)

@Szczepan: That's interesting. Unfortunately such measurements are not
(yet?) done or at least the results not yet published from the
different meteorological stations.

@Bill: Yes, I was asking for an *estimation*. Thank you for providing
the link to this paper. Will check now how well the results of this
fitted function compare with some extreme cases.


You say you want the water content of the atmosphere but do you want
the total water content of the atmosphere or the precipitable water
contnet?

Precipitable water is just the water vapor portion of the total water
content. It would exclude the liquid and solid water content in the
atmosphere. The JAM paper refers to a relationship between monthly
mean precipitable water and monthly mean dew point which is higher
smoothed average. Note that the daily or hourly relationship will be
much poorer. I would personally not put too much faith in hourly
estimates of precipitable water made from surface dew point or even
daily average dew ponit values.