Tropospheric infrared mapping spectrometers (TIMS) for Air Quality measurements

摘要

We are currently developing grating mapping spectrometers (GMS) with very high spectral resolution, very low noise, and very wide field of view. These also would be very compact facilitating deployment in either a leo or geo application. The measurement set could be very comprehensive, addressing air quality, climate change and meteorology, or subsets of these. For this presentation we'll focus on potential applications of these GMS for air quality measurements of the species ozone O_3, formaldehyde HCHO and carbon monoxide CO. We will discuss these applications at various levels of complexity and the commensurate value for application to understanding and forecasting air quality. At lowest complexity we would utilize a single GMS operating in the solar reflective infrared region for column measurements of O_3 and HCHO. A more complex approach would utilize a second and/or third GMS for thermal emissive O_3 measurements that provide improved vertical resolution, and for CO profile. Our major emphasis is the lowest tropospheric air layer 0-2 km. For realistic models of these GMS we'll present retrieval performance as predicted by a linear error analysis. In a polar leo orbit the most complex approach could provide twice daily global mapping with some footprints as small as 1.6 km at nadir. We'll present results from an in house lab demonstration GMS. This demo is a predecessor to an advanced design that we are currently developing with support of the NASA ESTO Instrument Incubator Program (IIP).