  The report of an IUPAC Task Group, formed in 2011 on "Intensities and line
shapes in high-resolution spectra of water isotopologues from experiment and
theory" (Project No. 2011-022-2-100), on line profiles of isolated
high-resolution rotational-vibrational transitions perturbed by neutral
gas-phase molecules is presented. The well-documented inadequacies of the Voigt
profile (VP), used almost universally by databases and radiative-transfer
codes, to represent pressure effects and Doppler broadening in isolated
vibrational-rotational and pure rotational transitions of the water molecule
have resulted in the development of a variety of alternative line-profile
models. These models capture more of the physics of the influence of pressure
on line shapes but, in general, at the price of greater complexity. The Task
Group recommends that the partially Correlated quadratic-Speed-Dependent
Hard-Collision profile should be adopted as the appropriate model for
high-resolution spectroscopy. For simplicity this should be called the
Hartmann--Tran profile (HTP). The HTP is sophisticated enough to capture the
various collisional contributions to the isolated line shape, can be computed
in a straightforward and rapid manner, and reduces to simpler profiles,
including the Voigt profile, under certain simplifying assumptions.
