Development of a Climatological Data Set from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment for Validating Atmospheric Model Simulations

• Main Authors: Kaley A. Walker, Jeffrey R. Taylor
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.498.5177; http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/SPARC/SPARC2008GA/Posters/SessionC_P112_A64_Walker_new.pdf

satellite mission to perform remote sensing measurements of the Earth's atmosphere (Bernath et al., 2005). The satellite was successfully launched into low Earth orbit on 12 August 2003. The 650 km altitude, 74 degree circular orbit provides the mission with global coverage though the focus is on the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Routine satellite operations began in February 2004. Over the past 55 months, ACE has made more than 15,000 occultation measurements. ACE Satellite and ACE-FTS Instrument The transmittance spectra from the sunrise and sunset measurements are used to determine atmospheric profiles of trace gases, temperature, pressure and atmospheric extinction. Atmospheric information is retrieved from the spectra using a two step process (Boone et al., 2005). First, the CO2 features are used to retrieve the pressure and temperature profile for each occultation. Then the temperature profile is held fixed and volume mixing ratio profiles for the trace gas species are retrieved. The line parameters and cross sections from the HITRAN 2004 spectroscopic database are used for the processing of the ACE-FTS data. The current version of the ACE-FTS retrievals is version 2.2 with updates for O3, N2O5, and HDO. ACE-FTS measures down to 5 km (in the absence of significant clouds). Profiles of almost 30 different species are