Data analysis for the NASA EOS aura microwave limb sounder instrument
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Data analysis for the NASA EOS aura microwave limb sounder instrument W. Van Snyder · Nathaniel J. Livesey · William G. Read · Zvi Shippony
Received: 17 March 2011 / Accepted: 16 June 2011 / Published online: 19 July 2011 © Springer-Verlag (outside the USA) 2011
Abstract The microwave limb sounder is one of four instruments on the NASA Earth Observing System Aura spacecraft, launched 15 July 2004 into a near-polar sun-synchronous ∼705 km altitude orbit, which gives global coverage, day and night, with ∼13 orbits per day. The instrument passively views thermal emission from the limb of the Earth’s atmosphere in ∼1,000 microwave channels, viewing forward in the satellite flight direction. The antenna scans in the orbit plane from the surface to ∼100 km altitude at the limb every ∼25 s, a total of ∼3,500 scans per day with 148 integration periods per scan, giving >500 million measurements per day. We solve for ∼20 quantities that characterize the upper atmosphere at each of ∼70 levels on each scan, or ∼5 million results per day. Keywords Microwave limb sounder · Atmospheric chemistry · Atmospheric remote sensing · Radiative transfer · Nonlinear parameter estimation Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) 65-04 · 68U99 · 86-08
15-04 · 28-04 · 34-04 ·
1 Introduction The microwave limb sounder (MLS) is one of four instruments on the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura spacecraft, launched 15 July 2004 from Vandenberg The work described here was done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Copyright © 2011 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. W. V. Snyder (B) · N. J. Livesey · W. G. Read · Z. Shippony Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Mail Stop 183-701, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Geomath (2011) 2:147–173
Fig. 1 NASA “A-Train” of Earth-observing satellites. Aura is at the far left
Air Force Base in California into a near-polar (98 .◦ 14 inclination) sun-synchronous ∼705 km altitude orbit, which gives global coverage, day and night, with ∼13 orbits per day. The Aura spacecraft is part of the NASA “A-Train” (L’Ecuyer and Jiang 2010) of Earth-observing satellites shown in Fig. 1, all in the same orbit, passing the same point within about 8 min, thereby giving good synoptic coverage of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. OCO-2 has not been launched; it is a replacement for OCO, which unfortunately did not reach orbit. We survey here some of the mathematical problems immanent in data analysis for the MLS instrument, and methods used to solve those problems. Parts of this material have appeared in Read et al. (2006) and Livesey et al. (2006). Similar methods are used for two-dimensional retrieval by the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) instrument on ENVISAT (Papandrea et al. 2010). Similar but simpler methods were used for one-dimensional retrieval by
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