Oxford MIPAS meeting#72
15 Mar 05

• Minutes of recent MIPAS Science Team meeting [below] include plans for near future operations.
• Should be operating as planned - switched on approx 35% of time.
• A request has been sent to the EO help desk (7th March) asking for how to obtain information on near future MIPAS observation locations/times - so far (after 1 week) no response

• No change to reprocessed L1B stored at BADC in past few weeks
• Currently investigating whether it is possible for non-UK groups to have access to the BADC archive since this appears to be the only online archive of reprocessed L1B data
• The reprocessed data has the AB band often flagged bad (=4) at low altitude whereas the NRT data did not. The flag 4 indicates that the imaginary part of the spectrum exceeds some threshold value and the corresponding spectral points are set to zero. Since there seems to be no problem with these scans in the NRT data this may be due to some incorrectly set parameter in the input files.
• Although MIPAS is semi-operational, L1B processing has not yet started since only a prototype version of the L1B code is available (which was used to generate the test spectra from Dec04/Jan05.

• Orbit 7020 currently available
• Orbits 7021-7035 to follow

• No data received since 25th Feb 05

• New version: v14MAR05
• Also a new utility program read_l1c.pro

• Now retrieving temperature profile (0-10km@1km) jointly with surface temperature and O3 column.
• Also extending code to use more than one spectral region.

• Abstract & Registration Deadline is SOON: March 17th.

• CO precision of the order 20% at 6, 9km and 30% at 12,15km seems achievable
• Still need to investigate (from MIPAS spectra) whether the minor isotopic lines are in LTE - if they are (as IAA suggest) this would help distinguish the CO Jacobians from the VT Jacobians and give a better retrieval
• Using 0.0625cm-1 data at 3km intervals seems to add another 10% to the error - not yet investigated the current 1.5km spacing. [Next]

• Only one MIPAS (NRT) Orbit - 10227 - found so far which is close in coverage.
• Currently processing entire orbit using MORSE to retrieve standard species, plus CFC-11, CFC-12, CCL4, C2H6, H2O2, CO if possible.

• Results shown in [Science Team Presentation] (PDF file)
• Basically, temperatures look reasonable, although polar minimum < 190K is perhaps too cold. However, this may be explained by the radiances not yet being properly calibrated.
• These used the 3km spacing microwindows selected for processing the Aug04 data
• Microwindows are currently being selected for the new nominal mode with 1.5km UTLS spacing and a floating base altitude (6+/-3km), although the nominal mode test spectra supplied so far (from Dec04) have a fixed altitude grid.

• Minutes (PDF File)
• Presentation (PDF File) from AD covering pT retrievals with Dec04/Jan05 data and comparison of new microwindows selected for 1.5km spacing with microwindows selected to process Aug04 data (3km spacing)

The Spanish Ministry for Education and Science has opened a new application period for 350 postdoctoral (3 years, Juan de la Cierva Program) and 250 senior postdoctoral (5 years, Ramon y Cajal Program) positions in Spain. The deadline is the 2nd of April.

All the information related to these positions can be found in

http://www.mec.es/ciencia/cajal/
http://www.mec.es/ciencia/delacierva