Water vapour is one of the strongest absorbers of radiation in the Earth's atmosphere, but some other gases also play an important role in the atmospheric radiative transfer processes: carbon dioxide CO 2 , carbon monoxide CO, ozone О 3 , methane CH 4 . Minor atmospheric pollutants such as hydrogen sulphide H 2 S, methyl fluoride CH 3 F, methyl chloride CH 3 Cl, ethylene C 2 H 4 , nitric oxide NO, nitrous oxide N 2 O and nitrogen dioxide NO 2 are equally recognised for their implication in the fundamental chemical reactions occurring in the terrestrial atmosphere. As a consequence, a lot of spectroscopic studies are made for these molecules in order to obtain the line positions, intensities and widths. They are briefly summarised below, starting by asymmetric waterlike molecules of X 2 Y-type which have the same selection rules for vibrotational spectra.
Vibrotational lines of asymmetric X 2 Y moleculesBetween asymmetric tops of the X 2 Y type most attention in the spectroscopic literature is paid to the H 2 S, SO 2 , O 3 and NO 2 molecules. _________________________________________________________________ A vibrotational state (v 1 v 2 v 3 ) [J K a K c ] of these molecules is characterised by three vibrational quantum numbers v 1 , v 2 , v 3 and three rotational quantum numbers J, K a , K c . In the NO 2 molecule, having an unpaired electron (total electronic spin S = 1/2), each vibrotational level is split by the spin-rotational interaction into two components (J = N ± S) denoted by + or -, and the three rotational quantum numbers are N, K a , K c . For a given set of vibrotational quantum numbers the corresponding energies are obtained by a diagonalization of the effective Hamiltonian matrix of Eq. (3.