Long-term trends and radiative impact in vertically resolved stratospheric water vapour from ESA WV_cci data records

Water vapour in the upper troposphere and stratosphere has a significant impact both on the radiative and chemical properties of the atmosphere.  Reliable water vapour climate data records (CDRs) are essential for use in climate research, to assess vertically resolved trends and associated radiative impacts. Within the ESA Water Vapour Climate Change Initiative (WV_cci), new vertically resolved water vapour CDRs in the stratosphere and UTLS were merged from a range of satellite observations. In this contribution, we provide an overview of these CDRs, highlighting innovations in the merging methodologies and results from a detailed quality assessment. In particular, the long-term trends derived from the new water vapour CDRs are compared to other merged datasets, reanalyses, and simulations from chemistry-climate models, with the ESA WV_cci CDRs deemed to be valuable new datasets for climate studies.  We conclude that, mostly driven by dynamical variability, the derived water vapour trends vary significantly depending on the dataset used, chosen time period and location in the atmosphere. Using an off-line radiative transfer model, we estimate the consequence of these differences on the radiative forcing from water vapour changes in the upper troposphere and stratosphere over the past 30+ years.