Quasi-geostationary viewing of high latitudes for Weather, Climate and Air quality data using highly elliptical orbits: PCW/PHEOS-WCA
Abstract
Arctic climate is changing and the multi-year sea-ice cover is disappearing more rapidly that climate models estimate. With declining ice cover, the Arctic Ocean will likely be subject to increased shipping traffic in addition to exploration activity for natural resources with a concomitant increase in air pollution. Thus there is a need to monitor the polar region and an important method that can address many of the atmospheric issues is by quasi-geostationary viewing at high temporal resolution. For this reason, several Canadian government departments led by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are proposing the PCW (Polar Communications and Weather) mission to provide improved communications and critically important meteorological and air quality information for the Arctic, in particular wind information using an operational meteorological imager. Two satellites are planned to be in a highly eccentric orbit with apogee at ~ 40,000 km over the Arctic in order to have both quasi-geostationary viewing over the Arctic and environs and 24x7 coverage in the MIR and solar reflected light (UV-Vis-NIR) in the summer period. The planned operational meteorological instrument is a 21-channel spectral imager with UV, visible, NIR and MIR channels similar to MODIS or ABI. This presentation will focus on PHEOS WCA (Polar Highly Elliptical Orbital Science Weather, Climate and Air quality) mission, which is an atmospheric science complement to the operational PCW mission. The PHEOS WCA instrument package consists of FTS and UVS imaging sounders with viewing range of ~4.5 degrees or a FoR ~ 3400x3400 km2 from near apogee. The spatial resolution at apogee of each imaging sounder is targeted to be 10×10 km2 or better and the image repeat time is targeted at ~ 1-2 hours or better. The FTS has 4 bands that span the MIR and NIR. The MIR bands cover 700-1500 cm-1 and 1800-2700 cm-1 with a spectral resolution of 0.25 cm-1 i.e., a similar spectral resolution to IASI. They should provide vertical tropospheric profiles of temperature and water vapour in addition to partial columns of other gases of interest for air quality such as O3, CO, HCN, CH3OH, etc. and also CO2 and CH4. The two NIR bands cover 5990-6010 cm-1 (0.25 cm-1) and 13060-13168 cm-1 (0.5 cm-1) and target columns of CO2 and CH4 and the O2-A band for surface pressure, aerosol OD and albedo. The UVS is an imaging spectrometer that covers the spectral range of 280 - 650 nm with 0.9 nm resolution and targets the tropospheric column densities of O3 and NO2. It is also planned to obtain the tropospheric columns of BrO, SO2, HCHO and (HCO)2 on an opportunity basis and the aerosol index (AI) as well as stratospheric columns of O3, NO2 and BrO. One of the important goals for PHEOS-FTS is to measure changes in CO2 and CH4 throughout the day-lit hours in the NIR near apogee. The imaging design is to be sufficiently flexible so that it can be directed at special events and the FoR reduced to have more rapid spatial coverage. In this presentation we will outline the scientific objectives, status of retrieval algorithms and also the viewing geometry necessary with 2 satellites and the outcome of the PHEOS WCA Phase A study, funded by the CSA, which was completed in the spring of 2012.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.A31B0021M
- Keywords:
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- 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0322 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Constituent sources and sinks;
- 0368 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry;
- 0394 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Instruments and techniques