Reading notes-13

AIUS is a Michelson interferometer for measuring occultation transmittance spectra in the middle and upper atmosphere.

Its interferometer model is depocted in Figure1. AIUS has the characteristics similar to those of ACE-FTS. Both instruments have a spectral resolution of 2 cm-1. AIUS covers a spectral range from 750 cm-1 to 4100 cm-1, while ACE-FTS covers 750-4400 cm-1.

AIUS is a dual-band system composed of MCT(mercury cadmium telluride, 750-1850 cm-1) and InSb (1850-4160 cm-1). The instrument covers an altitude range from 8 to 100 km and has a field of view(FOV) of 1.25 mrad. A brief description of the two instruments is shown in Table 1.

AIUS observes atmospheric parameters remotely by recording solar transmittance spectra as it tracks the Sun and scans through the atmosphere.

The Sun tracking is carried out by a specific Sun-tracking camera. The position of the AIUS instrument is fixed.

However, the center field of view of the AIUS can be adjusted using a two-dimensional pointing mechanism. The center position of the Sun is acquired using real-time processing of the Sun-tracking image, which is fed back to the two-dimensional pointing mechanism, and the pointing mechanism is adjusted so that the central field of view of the detector always points to the center position of the Sun. The uncertainty of the Sun-tracking is within 25 urad.

AIUS travels is in a Sun-synchronous orbit and observes in a forward direction with a deviation angle from the along-track orbit.

The deviation angle varies between 0 and 25°. The occultation spectra are scanned in an upward direction from the time of the Sun rising above the horizon to the time of the Sun moving out of the atmosphere.

One orbit scan includes the measurements inside and outside of the atmosphere and the scan of deep space. It takes about two seconds in every scan at one tangent point. A scan sequence is acquired from the lowest altitude ( about 8 km) to the highest altitude (about 100km) in the atmosphere.

Then, the sensor moves outside of the atmosphere and detects the solar spectra. Subsequently, the pointing mirror points to the deep space for producing the cold reference, which is used to calibrate the systematic errors. A complete orbit scan takes about three minutes. The measurements are repeated for each sunrise. AIUS measurements are mainly over the Antarctic. Figure 3 shows the latitude coverage of AIUS that is between 55°S and 90°S.

The GF5-AIUS level 0 data is the interferometric data in a binary format. The level 1 data is stored in HDF5 files and includes reconstructed spectra and processed auxiliary data.

The AIUS level 0-1 processing includes four steps. The first step is the acquisition and processing of auxiliary data.

By unpacking the auxiliary data package, information such as acquisition time, Sun position, and satellite position, is acquired. The geometric parameters, height and latitude and longitude coordinates, are calculated from the information of the Sun and satellite.

The second step is to reconstruct the spectra from the original interferogram. However, the observed spectra can be contaminated by spokes that are related to the effect of energetic particles from space’s electromagnetic environment on orbits. The spike removal is considered in level 1 processing. Non-linear behavior of the detectors is expected and the corresponding correction is consolidated in-flight using data from the commissioning phase. After that, the FFT (fast Fourier transformation) is performed to compute the spectra.

The third step is to evaluate the spectra’s quality using the standard deviation or mean value of the imaginary part of the calculated spectra by adding an additional quality flag. The wavelength calibartion is carried out as well. First, the infulence of the Doppler effect is removed, and a linear relationship between the sampling points of the FOurier transform spectrometer and the corresponding spectral coefficients is established. The subsequent spectral calibartion is performed using a ploynomial fitting method.

The spectral resolution of AIUS is about 0.02 cm-1. Because of this, the number of data points from each absorption band becomes unrealistic for an efficient inversion process.

One should also avoid the effects from interfering chemical species for the retrieval of the target species to produce the best information from the retrieval. Thus, the retrieval is performed using a set of narrow spectral intervals instead of an entire spectral band.

To select an appropriate set of microwindows, a sensitivity analysis with Jacobians is required, First of all, the spectral points that are sensitive to the target gas at each cutting height and are not sensitive to the interference gas according to the Jacobians of target and the interference species are selected.

Then, the selected spectral points are increased on the basis of information entropy to generate a series of continuous window. Finally, all the selected spectral microwindows at every tangent height are combined.

引自文章《monitoring Trace Gases over the Antarctic Using Atmospheric Infrared Utlraspectral Sounder Onboard GaoFen-5: Algorithm Description and First Retrieval Results of O3, H2O and HCl》