| Summary: | At nighttime the strongest source of radiation is the hydroxyl night glow. By measuringthe different lines within a band it is possible to calculate the temperature of the mesosphere more than 85km above ground. In order to do this a spectrometer system hasbeen calibrated and software has been developed. The software include a program tocontrol the spectrometer and automatically take data spectra through the night, and aprogram to process the result and calculate the temperature. Two measurements weredone, the (3,1) and (4,2) bands the night of 31. march 2011 and the (7,4) and (8,5)bands the night of 6. may 2011. Both of them were done at NTNU Trondheim (latitude: 63.4 degrees and longitude: 10.4 degrees). The temperature found was 201.85K+/− 3.55K for the (3,1) band, 205.11K +/− 17.94K for the (4,2) band, 199.63K +/−29.86K for the (7,4) band and 196.37K +/− 8.41K for the (8,5) band. Since the (7,4)and (8,5) bands were measured later than the (3,1) and (4,2) bands, they should becolder. The predicted temperature was also calculated using a program developed atThe British Antarctic Survey that uses the MSIS-E-00 [Picone et al., 2003] model for thebackground atmosphere. The predicted temperatures were 202.3K for the (3,1) band,201.7K for the (4,2) band, 176.5K for the (7,4) band and 176.4K for the (8,5) band. Thepredicted temperature and measured temperature are almost the same for the (3,1) and(4,2) bands while it is about 20-25K lower for the (7,4) and (8,5) bands.
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