Atmospheric precipitable water vapor tracking during 2023-2025 Amerigo Vespucci world tour

The 2023–2025 world tour undertaken by the Italian Navy’s Amerigo Vespucci vessel constitutes a unique and valuable opportunity to perform continuous monitoring of atmospheric Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. PWV represents a critical parameter for accurately monitoring and forecasting extreme precipitation events, assessing climate variability, and improving the positioning accuracy of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). In this context, the installation onboard of a GNSS receiver equipped with external geodetic antenna and a weather station opened the possibility to track PWV along the world tour route with the final aim to to develop a comprehensive geo-DataBase (geoDB)of PWV values, spatially and temporally referenced to the ship trajectory across the globe. The GNSS-derived PWV values will be compared with outputs from meteorological models in order to assess their consistency, to evaluate the reliability of the derived results, and to consider the potential future assimilation into meteorological models.