Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications
Absorption of terahertz radiation by atmospheric water vapor is a serious impediment for radio astronomy and for long-distance communications. Transmission in the THz regime is dependent almost exclusively on atmospheric precipitable water vapor (PWV). Though much of the Earth has PWV that is too hi...
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ftdatacite:10.48550/arxiv.1312.5918 2023-05-15T14:03:02+02:00 Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications Suen, Jonathan Y. Fang, Michael T. Lubin, Philip M. 2013 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1312.5918 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5918 unknown arXiv https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tthz.2013.2294018 arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM FOS Physical sciences article-journal Article ScholarlyArticle Text 2013 ftdatacite https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1312.5918 https://doi.org/10.1109/tthz.2013.2294018 2022-04-01T13:01:31Z Absorption of terahertz radiation by atmospheric water vapor is a serious impediment for radio astronomy and for long-distance communications. Transmission in the THz regime is dependent almost exclusively on atmospheric precipitable water vapor (PWV). Though much of the Earth has PWV that is too high for good transmission above 200 GHz, there are a number of dry sites with very low attenuation. We performed a global analysis of PWV with high-resolution measurements from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on two NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites over the year of 2011. We determined PWV and cloud cover distributions and then developed a model to find transmission and atmospheric radiance as well as necessary integration times in the various windows. We produced global maps over the common THz windows for astronomical and satellite communications scenarios. Notably, we show that up through 1 THz, systems could be built in excellent sites of Chile, Greenland and the Tibetan Plateau, while Antarctic performance is good to 1.6 THz. For a ground-to-space communication link up through 847 GHz, we found several sites in the Continental United States where mean atmospheric attenuation is less than 40 dB; not an insurmountable challenge for a link. : 15 pages, 23 figures Text Antarc* Antarctic Greenland DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) Antarctic Greenland |
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DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) |
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topic |
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM FOS Physical sciences |
spellingShingle |
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM FOS Physical sciences Suen, Jonathan Y. Fang, Michael T. Lubin, Philip M. Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
topic_facet |
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM FOS Physical sciences |
description |
Absorption of terahertz radiation by atmospheric water vapor is a serious impediment for radio astronomy and for long-distance communications. Transmission in the THz regime is dependent almost exclusively on atmospheric precipitable water vapor (PWV). Though much of the Earth has PWV that is too high for good transmission above 200 GHz, there are a number of dry sites with very low attenuation. We performed a global analysis of PWV with high-resolution measurements from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on two NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites over the year of 2011. We determined PWV and cloud cover distributions and then developed a model to find transmission and atmospheric radiance as well as necessary integration times in the various windows. We produced global maps over the common THz windows for astronomical and satellite communications scenarios. Notably, we show that up through 1 THz, systems could be built in excellent sites of Chile, Greenland and the Tibetan Plateau, while Antarctic performance is good to 1.6 THz. For a ground-to-space communication link up through 847 GHz, we found several sites in the Continental United States where mean atmospheric attenuation is less than 40 dB; not an insurmountable challenge for a link. : 15 pages, 23 figures |
format |
Text |
author |
Suen, Jonathan Y. Fang, Michael T. Lubin, Philip M. |
author_facet |
Suen, Jonathan Y. Fang, Michael T. Lubin, Philip M. |
author_sort |
Suen, Jonathan Y. |
title |
Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
title_short |
Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
title_full |
Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
title_fullStr |
Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
title_full_unstemmed |
Global Distribution of Water Vapor and Cloud Cover--Sites for High Performance THz Applications |
title_sort |
global distribution of water vapor and cloud cover--sites for high performance thz applications |
publisher |
arXiv |
publishDate |
2013 |
url |
https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1312.5918 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5918 |
geographic |
Antarctic Greenland |
geographic_facet |
Antarctic Greenland |
genre |
Antarc* Antarctic Greenland |
genre_facet |
Antarc* Antarctic Greenland |
op_relation |
https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tthz.2013.2294018 |
op_rights |
arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1312.5918 https://doi.org/10.1109/tthz.2013.2294018 |
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1766273513962864640 |