Speaker
Description
The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) that launched in November 2022 on the NOAA-21 satellite contains the second in a series of NASA Limb Profiler (LP) instruments to be launched through 2034. The NOAA-21 LP has the same basic design as the SNPP LP operating since 2012 but includes several enhancements to improve stray light performance, reduce noise, and remedy some troubling thermal sensitivities of the earlier build. Stray light improvements at NIR wavelengths were emphasized because of their importance for aerosol extinction retrievals. Steeper atmospheric vertical signal gradients at long wavelengths result in enhanced contamination from internally-scattered photons, which is especially problematic at altitudes used by the retrievals for radiance normalization.
In this presentation we will describe the instrument changes and present initial performance results from the NOAA-21 instrument including, but not limited to, vertical coverage, pointing accuracy, out-of-field and out-of-band stray light, and the effects of vertical aliasing due to spacecraft motion. Where possible we compare the NOAA-21 instrument performance to that of the SNPP instrument. Such comparisons are helpful for discriminating between instrumental and geophysical phenomena observed in the data product.
