Description of SAFIRE for ISES

Abstract

The SAFIRE (Spectroscopy of the Atmosphere using Far Infrared Emission) is a limb emission experiment using a far-IR Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) and a mid-IR broadband multispectral radiometer covering the range 80 to 1600/cm. The purpose of this experiment is to obtain vertical distributions of temperature and key constituents of O(y), HO(y), NO(y), ClO(y), and BrO(y) families in the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere. The spectral channels and gases within each channel are summarized. The instrument includes a 48 element (6 x 8) Ge:GA detector array operating at 4 K in the far-IR and a 105 element (7 x 15) HgCdTe array operating at 80 K in the mid-IR. The SAFIRE uses four different scan modes for vertical coverage and resolution to address various scientific requirements. The SAFIRE data reduction will start with the retrieval of temperature profile as a function of pressure using two CO2 channel data. Constituent distributions then are obtained from other channel data using the retrieved temperature profile. The SAFIRE measurements are limited to the region above the tropopause because of radiance saturation by H2O and clouds. The computational capability necessary to process at the instrument data rate is estimated to be 19 MFLOPS for FTS data and 0.02 MFLOPS for radiometer data. It seems, therefore, that the real-time applications of SAFIRE data using an onboard processing device is not feasible. Although a temperature anomaly may be detected from the two CO2 radiometer channels using an onboard processor for the stratosphere, it is not possible to distinguish between CO2 outflux and temperature anomaly. Temperature anomaly does not, therefore, offer tropospheric information useful for real-time application