Vapor correction of FTIR spectra - A simple automatic least squares approach.

FTIR spectroscopy is one of the best techniques to study intermolecular interactions. However, such an application requires high quality spectra with as little noise as possible, which are often difficult to obtain. One of the main sources of unwanted interference is water vapor. Here a robust method is proposed for automatic, fast and reliable vapor correction of FTIR spectra. The presented least squares approach of vapor subtraction using many vapor spectra and a special residual function provides a much better correction. It does not rely on the researcher's experience, no coefficients are arbitrarily chosen or tweaked, thus such results are more trustworthy and accurate.