Speaker
Description
The Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere (GLORIA) is a limb-imaging Fourier-Transform spectrometer (iFTS) providing mid-infrared spectra with high spectral resolution (0.0625 cm-1 in the wavelength range 780-1400 cm-1). GLORIA, a demonstrator for the Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT, one of the candidates selected for Phase 0 for the ESA Earth Explorer 11 mission) was deployed on the Russian M55 Geophysica and is still being deployed on HALO, the German high-altitude research aircraft. In order to enhance the vertical range of GLORIA to observations in the middle stratosphere albeit still reaching down to the middle troposphere, the instrument was adapted to measurements from stratospheric balloon platforms. GLORIA-B performed its first flight from Kiruna (northern Sweden) in August 2021 and its second flight from Timmins (Ontario/Canada) in August 2022 in the framework of the EU Research Infrastructure HEMERA.
The objectives of GLORIA-B observations for these campaigns have been primarily its technical qualification and the provision of a first imaging hyperspectral limb-emission dataset from 5 to 36 km altitude as well as scientific objectives, which are, amongst others, the observation of the evolution of the upper tropospheric and stratospheric chlorine and nitrogen budget/family partitioning in a changing climate in combination with the set of 20 MIPAS-B (Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding - Balloon) flights from 1995 to 2014, the observation of the BrONO2 evolution during sunset and sunrise, in synergy with BrO observations by the TotalBrO instrument (Univ. Heidelberg) on the same gondola, as well as the quantification of pollution of the Arctic and mid-latitude upper troposphere/lower stratosphere through forest fires.
In this contribution we will demonstrate the performance of GLORIA-B with regard to level-2 data, consisting of retrieved altitude profiles of a variety of trace gases. We will show examples of selected results together with uncertainty estimations, altitude resolution as well as comparisons with externally available datasets.
