Remote sensing of atmospheric structure and composition by pressure modulator radiometry from space: The ISAMS experiment on UARS

Abstract

The scientific objectives of the improved stratospheric and mesospheric sounder (ISAMS) experiment involve the measurement of global temperature and composition profiles from an instrument on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS). This paper describes the instrument concept, its design, and its performance as calculated and as measured in the laboratory. The data retrieval technique, operating modes, observing strategy, and the error budget are briefly discussed.

Validation of HNO<sub>3</sub>, ClONO<sub>2</sub>, and N<sub>2</sub>O<sub>5</sub> from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS)

“…Like ClONO 2 , stratospheric N 2 O 5 has been detected from space by ATMOS , CRISTA (Riese et al, 1997(Riese et al, , 1999, CLAES (Kumer et al, 1996b(Kumer et al, , 1997, ILAS Oshchepkov et al, 2006), and ILAS-II . In addition, ISAMS, which operated on UARS from October 1991 to July 1992, detected N 2 O 5 using pressure modulated radiometry (Taylor et al, 1993;Smith et al, 1996;Kumer et al, 1997). MIPAS is again the only instrument, other than ACE-FTS, which is currently measuring N 2 O 5 from space (Mengistu Tsidu et al, 2004).…”

“…HNO 3 was measured during a series of Space Shuttle missions by the Atmospheric Trace MOlecule Spectroscopy (ATMOS) instrument, flown four times between 1985 and 1994 Irion et al, 2002), by the CRyogenic InfraRed Radiance Instrumentation for Shuttle (CIRRIS 1A) (Bingham et al, 1997) in 1991, and by the CRyogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere (CRISTA) in 1994 (Offermann et al, 1999;Riese et al, 1999). With the launch of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) in 1991, longer-term global distributions of HNO 3 were retrieved by the Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) (Roche et al, , 1994Kumer et al, 1996a), the Improved Stratospheric And Mesospheric Sounder (ISAMS) (Taylor et al, 1993(Taylor et al, , 1994(Taylor et al, , 1995, and the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) (Santee et al, 1999(Santee et al, , 2004. The latter provides the most extensive HNO 3 dataset to date.…”

High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder observations of polar stratospheric clouds and subvisible cirrus

“…Subsequent solar occultation experiments, including the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) [McCormick and Veiga, 1992], Polar Ozone and Aerosol Measurement (POAM) [Bevilacqua et al, 2002], and HALOE [Russell et al, 1993] experiments, have measured stratospheric aerosol and PSCs from 1978 through 2005. Emission limb sensors, such as the Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) [Roche et al, 1993] and Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder (ISAMS) [Taylor et al, 1993], measured PSCs in the early 1990s, while the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) is currently collecting PSC measurements [Spang et al, 2005]. Measurements of cirrus near the tropopause commenced with SAGE [Wang et al, 1996], and continued through 2005 with SAGE III [Kent et al, 2007] and HALOE observations.…”

Daytime SABER/TIMED observations of water vapor in the mesosphere: retrieval approach and first results

“…Spaceborne measurements of the water vapor altitude distributions started in 1978 with the launch of the Nimbus-7 spacecraft observatory that utilized the SAMS (Drummond et al, 1980) and the LIMS (Gille et al, 1980) instruments for water vapor observations. Since then water vapor has been measured by a number of space experiments: HALOE (Russell et al, 1993), ISAMS (Taylor et al, 1993), ATMOS (Gunson et al, 1996), CRISTA-1,2 (Offermann et al, 1999;, and others. Six satellite-borne instruments are currently performing water vapor measurements in the upper atmosphere: the ACE-FTS/Scisat-1 and SOFIE/AIM (Gordley et al, 2009) instruments use an occultation technique, while MLS/Aura (Waters et al, 1999), SMR/Odin (Murtagh et al, 2002), SABER/TIMED (Russell et al, 1999), and MIPAS/Envisat (Fischer et al, 2008) measure atmospheric emission in the limb.…”