Mesospheric water vapor

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The importance of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere cannot be understated. It is an active green-house gas, important energy conveyer in the troposhere and a key element in many chemical reactions in the middle atmosphere. Yet, there are still many questions concerning the water vapor dynamics in the middle atmosphere. This thesis present a new, state-of-the art, microwave instrument developed in order to shed light on some of these issues. The high sensitivity and time-resolution enable us to resolve fast dynamical events which was not possible before. Furthermore it expands an already long dataset and a mean vertical distribution of water vapor for polar latitudes is presented.