The Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT) is one of the four candidates for ESA’s Earth Explorer 11. By exploiting its imaging capabilities, CAIRT can sound the atmosphere simultaneously from the middle troposphere to the lower thermosphere at high spectral resolution and with unprecedented horizontal and vertical resolution. Flying in loose formation with MetOp-SG mission...
Aerosols are present in the atmosphere of Mars and have a major effect on it. They are mainly composed of dust, water ice and CO2 ice. Dust is confined to lower altitudes during the aphelion season and can reach higher altitudes during the perihelion, especially during dust storms that frequently arise on Mars. These storms can sometimes grow up to cover the entire planet and are then called...
The data record of the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) currently covers more than 18 years, far exceeding its original 5-year design life. As part of the A-train constellation, the long MLS data record and the comparatively high spatio-temporal resolution of its retrieval products provide a unique opportunity to apply machine learning techniques to enhance its observational...
The Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT) is one of four candidates for ESA’s Earth Explorer 11. It's imaging capabilities will be used to offer several independent measurement tracks across its swath and thus deliver, in combination with tomographic retrieval techniques, a true 3-D product with a high vertical resolution (down to 1km).
In this work, we will examine and...
AerGOM is a retrieval algorithm that was specifically designed to retrieve stratospheric aerosol extinction from the Global Ozone Monitoring by the Occultation of Stars (GOMOS) experiment that was launched onboard Envisat and provided measurements of the Earth atmospheric limb between 2002 and 2012.
While AerGOM retrieves simultaneously aerosol extinction, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and...
The Earth’s hydrogen (H) corona has been observed from various platforms for over half a century and many of these measurements, particularly those made in recent times, leverage the observation of solar H-Lyman-α (121.6 nm) photons resonantly scattered by H. Interpreting these observations becomes increasingly complex in the optically thick region of the corona below 3 Earth-radii (RE) where...
The study of Jupiter’s atmosphere is of interest to the scientific community, including its composition, evolution, distribution, structure, and dynamics around the planet. Although the main chemical composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere has been unraveled, many questions remain open, such as the global abundance of water, or the responsible chemistry for the coloration of the clouds....
To monitor stratospheric ozone and aerosols, the ALTIUS mission will perform measurements either in limb scattering mode or in occultation mode. In this mode, the satellite will observe the Sun during sunrise and sunset, and the rises and sets of the brightest stars and planets during the night. To increase the geographic coverage of the observations, lunar measurements will also be carried...
ALTIUS (Atmospheric Limb Tracker for the Investigation of the Upcoming Stratosphere) is the upcoming stratospheric ozone monitoring mission of ESA’s Earth Watch program. ALTIUS consists of three 2D high resolution imagers: UV (250-355 nm), VIS (440-675 nm) and NIR (600-1040 nm) channels. Each channel is independent of the others and takes snapshots of the atmosphere in limb geometry at...
Using ozonesonde data from the Harmonization and Evaluation of Ground Based Instruments for Free Tropospheric Ozone Measurements (HEGIFTOM) and other satellite data sets (e.g. MLS), we compared the ozone trend from Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite Limb Profiler (OMPS-LP) in upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). The detailed comparisons between these datasets reveal the temporal and...
The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) is an externally affixed payload on the International Space Station (ISS; SAGE III/ISS). SAGE III/ISS retrieves highly resolved vertical profiles of gaseous atmospheric constituent number density including ozone, water vapor, and nitrogen dioxide, as well as aerosol extinction coefficient at nine wavelengths in the visible to near-IR...
Polar stratospheric clouds (PSC) play an important role in polar ozone loss. However, there are still gaps in our knowledge about PSCs and nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) particles in particular. Active lidar and passive limb emission satellite instruments allow for PSC measurements over the entire winter season at both poles and provide a classification between the three types: ice, NAT, and...
The evolution of the size distribution of stratospheric aerosols after volcanic eruptions is still not understood very well, due to the temporal sparsity of in situ measurements, the low spatial coverage by ground based observations and the difficulties to derive aerosol size information from satellite measurements. To contribute to this ongoing research, we show data from our aerosol size...
Solar radiation management has been proposed as a method to combat and control changes in the climate of Earth. The method aims at the intentional releasing of aerosol into the atmosphere to adjust radiative forcing. However, there is significant uncertainty in the evolution of artificial aerosol particles, as well as the atmospheric dynamics of such a release. The Stratospheric Controlled...
The Atmospheric Limb Tracker for the Investigation of the Upcoming Stratosphere (ALTIUS) is a high spatial resolution spectral imager designed to measure ozone and other trace species in the stratosphere. A stratospheric aerosol retrieval is included to provide input for the ozone retrieval, and an official stratospheric aerosol secondary product is expected. Here we describe the...
We give an overview of the Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) used in the bright limb retrieval of the ALTIUS project.
The chosen RTM is SMART-G, which is an RTM of Monte Carlo type, owned by HYGEOS, Euratechnologies, 165 Avenue de Bretagne, 59000 Lille, France, Tel: + 33 (0) 3 20 08 24 98, E-mail: contact@hygeos.com.
SMART-G is BISA's preferred Radiative Transfer (RT) software tool for the...
Aerosols and clouds dominate Earth's radiation budget and climate in the tropical UTLS. Satellites must continuously monitor and identify these layers to quantify their radiative impact. Under altered UTLS conditions after volcanic eruptions and wildfires, distinguishing aerosols from clouds is difficult. Aerosol-cloud distinction relies on wavelength-dependent scattering and absorption. We...
