Upper troposphere and lower stratosphere observations and results from the OSIRIS instrument on-board Odin

The Odin satellite, which is in a sun-synchronous orbit with the ascending node at 1800 LT, includes a sub-mm/mm radiometer and a combined optical spectrograph and infrared imager (OSIRIS). Both instruments obtain atmospheric images when Odin is set to scan the terrestrial limb. For OSIRIS these limb images include both the Rayleigh scattered sunlight and the airglow, even at low tangent altitudes the mesospheric airglow emission is detectable. Although Odin was only launched in late February, 2001, the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere ozone profile has been retrieved on a regular basis throughout the month of August, 2001. These derived pro- files are in excellent agreement with those from sondes as well as other satellites. At the end of October observations of the Antarctic region can be made and it is possi- ble to retrieve ozone profiles within the ozone hole. In this paper some of these high spatial resolution data are presented and it is shown that if the limb observations are combined with nadir mappers it is possible to obtain significant new information about the troposphere.