The application of infrared hyper-spectral sounder data to climate research requires the global analysis of multi-decadal time series of various atmosphere, surface or cloud related parameters. The data used in this analysis has to meet stringent global and scene independent absolute accuracy and stability requirements, it also has to be spatially and radiometrically unbiased, manageable in size and self-contained. Self-contained means that the data set contains not only a globally unbiased sample of the state of the Earth Climate system as seen in the infrared, it has to contain enough data to contrast clear with average (cloudy) data and to allow an independent assessment of the radiometric and spectral accuracy and stability of the data. We illustrate this with data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Infrared Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer (IASI) data. AIRS and IASI were designed with fairly similar functional requirements. AIRS was launched on the EOS Aqua spacecraft in May 2002 into a 705 km polar sun-synchronous orbit with accurately maintained 1:30 PM ascending node. Essentially un-interrupted data are available since September 2002. Since October 2006 IASI is in a 9:30 AM polar orbit at 815 km altitude on the MetOp2 satellite, with data available since May 2007.

Date Published: 24 September 2007
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 6684, Atmospheric and Environmental Remote Sensing Data Processing and Utilization III: Readiness for GEOSS, 66840P (24 September 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.734573

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6684:
Atmospheric and Environmental Remote Sensing Data Processing and Utilization III: Readiness for GEOSS
Mitchell D. Goldberg; Hal J. Bloom; Allen H.-L. Huang; Philip E. Ardanuy, Editor(s)