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Science 9 August 2002:
Vol. 297. no. 5583, pp. 943 - 945
DOI: 10.1126/science.1075934
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Perspectives

LASER CHEMISTRY:
Water Vapor Gets Excited

Peter F. Bernath

Water vapor plays a key role in the absorption of solar radiation and the trapping of thermal energy in the atmosphere, and has been detected in solar sunspots, cool stars, and brown dwarfs. But as Bernath explains in his Perspective, it has been difficult to calculate exact absorption spectra for water vapor because the experimental data used to test the models were insufficiently accurate. He highlights the report by Callegari et al., whose novel method provides highly accurate measurements of water dipole moments for comparison with models.

The author is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada. E-mail: bernath{at}uwaterloo.ca

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)