Seminar Ozean, Eis, Atmosphäre

Termin: 08.01.2002

Referent/in: Heinrich Bovensmann, iup/ife-Bremen

Title: Tropospheric Sensing from Geostationary Orbit

Due to the increase in human activity on Earth there is a clear need to assess the importance of anthropogenic activity and natural phenomena on the changing tropospheric composition. In the troposphere the variability of chemical loss and source strength combined with the dynamics of transport and mixing induce significant and important short term, i.e. sub-hourly, variations and significant horizontal and vertical variability of constituents and geophysical parameters.
To study the tropospheric composition it is therefore required to link diurnal with seasonal and annual timescales, as well as regional with continental and global spatial scales, by performing sub-hourly measurements at appropriate horizontal and vertical resolution. Tropospheric observations from low-Earth orbit (LEO) platforms are limited, for example by the daily revisit time and local cloud cover statistic, resulting in the fact that the troposphere is currently significantly undersampled. Measurements from Geostationary Orbit (GEO) offer the only practical approach to the observation of diurnal variation from space with the pertinent horizontal resolution.
The talk will summarise the potential and feasibility of tropospheric remote sensing from geostationary orbit with passive instrumentation detecting solar backscatter (UV-VIS-SWIR) and the thermal IR emission.