Oxford MIPAS meeting#109
9 January 07
Our suggestion is, then, the same as from John Remedios - sunlight is
being directly backscattered from clouds into MIPAS. If that is the case
then it should be evident in the sun-satellite-tangentpoint geometry.
The only strange thing about this explanation is that we would also have
expected to have seen this problem every year, not just in 2006. We now
take many more low altitude sweeps than before (and therefore more cloud
contaminated sweeps) so perhaps it was not so noticeable earlier, but
there should have been some occurrences in the same latitude bands at the
same time of year. Have the D band gain settings been changed between the
2002-2004 period and the current observations?
Your plots of the monthly occurrences seem to lie along the direction of
the "day-time" parts of the orbit, which is not something you mentioned
in your report. This, together with the movement of the latitude bands
with time, both suggest that it is something to do with the sun-satellite
geometry.