Water Vapor 1. A characteristic of the Earth's climate system is its great complexity. Couplings between vast arrays of processes are thought to produce a series of complex feedbacks in response to any given reove the atmosphere and oceans and the hydrological processes that shape the energy exchanges.
Water vapor is important to the transport and release of latent heat.
The amount of water vapor present in the atmosphere influences the rate of evaporation from the surface, a process of crucial importance to our understanding the surface energy budget. The transport and divergence of water vapor are essential ingredients in determining the distribution of solid and liquid water in the atmosphere and therefore crucial to the significant and perplexing problem of cloud feedback in climate change. The atmospheric distribution of water vapor is critical in determining the energy balance at the ocean surface and indirectly, in the fresh water flux into the ocean. In that context, the atmospheric water vapor is of a vital importance in determining the interaction of the ocean and the atmosphere on a wide spectrum of space and time scales. To achieve these three goals, research is discussed in terms of two broad and connected areas.