Intensities and self-broadening coefficients of the strongest water vapour lines in the 2.7 and 6.25 μm absorption bands

•New lab measurements of the strongest H2O lines within δ and ν bands.•Intensities and self-broadening coefficients of the strong H2O lines are derived.•The new line parameters are compared with HITRAN and with recent ab initio calculations.

Intensities and self-broadening coefficients are presented for about 460 of the strongest water vapour lines in the spectral regions 1400-1840 cm−1 and 3440-3970 cm−1 at room temperature, obtained from rather unique measurements using a 5-mm-path-length cell. The retrieved spectral line parameters are compared with those in the HITRAN database ver. 2008 and 2012 and with recent ab-initio calculations. Both the retrieved intensities and half-widths are on average in reasonable agreement with those in HITRAN-2012. Maximum systematic differences do not exceed 4% for intensities (1600 cm−1 band) and 7% for self-broadening coefficients (3600 cm−1 band). For many lines however significant disagreements were detected with the HITRAN-2012 data, exceeding the average uncertainty of the retrieval. In addition, water vapour line parameters for 5300 cm−1 (1.9 μm) band reported by us in 2005 were also compared with HITRAN-2012, and show average differences of 4-5% for both intensities and half-widths.