Oxford MIPAS meeting#60
10 Aug 04

Present

Oxford: Alastair Burgess, Anu Dudhia, Don Grainger, Vivienne Payne, Chiara Piccolo, Gareth Thomas
RAL: Victoria Jay

Instrument Status [Prev] [Next]

Some details on the Envisat Web-Site including Instrument Availability web-site

MIPAS operations at reduced spectral resolution were planned for orbit 12770 (9th August) but no L2 NRT data received yet
See Message from Rob Koopman

L1 Data [Prev] [Next]

Discussions underway for reprocessed L1 data (ie data used to generate MIPAS Off Line L2 products) to be sent to BADC, which will be the UK archive

Isotopic Retrievals (VP) [Prev] [Next]

Using MORSE to retrieve isotopes of H2O and CH4. Comparisons of 22 Nov 02 with model results from David Noone (NCAR) show

HDO [VMR & Delta] behaves as expected
H2 18O [VMR & Delta] very different, with much more vertical and latitudinal structure than predicted

(note that VMRs are scaled to main isotope values by the HITRAN weighting of isotopic line strengths, Delta=0 corresponds to the VMR being the same as the main isotope VMR).

Pressure Retrieval (AD) [Prev] [Next]

Iris Yiu has now completed her Undergraduate vacation project to investigate whether it is possible to directly retrieve tangent pressure from L1B spectra by simply taking the ratio of the average radiances in two specifically chosen microwindows (analagous to the cloud-detection).

[Plot] shows comparison of directly retrieved pressure (y-axis) against `traditional' L2 pT retrieval (x-axis) for each sweep in Orbit 2081. Different symbols represent linear and quadratic interpolation methods for direct retrieval.
Conclusion is that most of the time the direct retrieval works quite well but not yet a practical scheme due to the large number of outliers
Hope to develop this further next October as part of an M.Phys project.

Envisat & ERS Symposium, Salzburg 6-10 Sep 2004 [Prev] [Next]

Website: http://www.congrex.nl/04a06/

Note that papers for the proceedings are due by September 10th - 10 pages max for oral presentations, 6 pages max for posters [Author Guidelines]
The Oxford group are booked into the Hotel Drei Kreuz [http://www.hoteldreikreuz.at/]

Quality Working Group Meeting#4 (Paris, 19/20 Jul 04) [Prev] [Next]

[Minutes] from the meeting, from Simone Ceccherini (IFAC), converted to PDF.

ODIN Comparisons (CP) [Prev] [Next]

Working on joint paper with ODIN team on N2O comparisons
O3 minor isotopes show poor agreement - currently researching literature for previous measurements/theory.

OCS Retrievals (AB) [Prev] [Next]

Using OPTIMO to retrieve OCS from MIPAS spectra: [Jan 03] and [Aug 03] (smaller boxes = fewer points included in mean)

Improved cloud-clearing algorithm results in better coverage over the equator (previously all cloud-contaminated profiles were discarded, now only cloud-contaminated profile levels are discarded)
Zonal mean for Orbit 2081 shows good agreement with results of Didem Alpaslan (U.Bol) using ORM and different microwindows.
Note that zonal mean field of OCS does not show clear tropopause as might be expected for a long-lived tracer with only a stratospheric sink

AURA Satellite (DG)

NASA's Aura satellite was successfully launched on July 15th [http://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov]

HIRDLS instrument gradually being switched on - behaving as expected so far [Next]
TES are planning to be operational by September [Next]

Email from Rob Koopman, ESRIN, 10th Aug 2004

MIPAS operations have resumed yesterday. The instrument is operated in a modified operations mode, at 40.99% of its original nominal maximal path difference, meaning that its spectral resolution degrades by a factor ~2.5.
This maximum path difference was selected to maximise operational safety of the instrument, with respect to anomalies detected during the earlier operations. The observation modes of the instrument will be reviewed after inspection of preliminary data products.
Modifications to the processors and their configuration are ongoing to obtain optimal data quality within certain processing performance constraints. In the case of level 2 processing, initial studies indicate that data quality will not degrade if the spectral microwindows are adapted and increased in number.
You will be informed of further progress towards delivery of the new level 1B and level 2 products to Cal/Val teams, expected to resume in Autumn.

Oxford MIPAS meeting#60 10 Aug 04

Oxford MIPAS meeting#60
10 Aug 04