Advancing the Quality of Solar Occultation Retrievals through Solar Imaging
Abstract
The quality of retrieved profiles (e.g. mixing ratio, temperature, pressure, and extinction) from solar occultation sensors is strongly dependent on the angular fidelity of the measurements. The SOFIE instrument, launched on-board the AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) satellite on April 25, 2007, was designed to provide very high precision broadband measurements for the study of Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs), that appear near 83km, just below the high latitude summer mesopause. The SOFIE instrument achieves an unprecedented angular fidelity by imaging the sun on a 2D detector array and tracking the edges with an uncertainty of <0.1 arc seconds. This makes possible retrieved profiles of vertical high resolution mixing ratios, refraction base temperature and pressure from tropopause to lower mesosphere, and transmission with accuracy sufficient to infer cosmic smoke extinction. Details of the approach and recent results will be presented.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008AGUFM.A54A..07G
- Keywords:
-
- 3360 Remote sensing