Pressure and Temperature Retrievals From the SAGE III/Eos Measurements

Abstract

The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) instrument will be an updated version of the SAGE series of flight instruments which have successfully operated on various spacecraft platforms for remote sensing of the atmosphere utilizing the solar occultation technique. SAGE III has been selected for the definition phase study (phase A/B) for the National Polar Platform One (NPOP1) and the Space Station Attached Pay load (SSAP) of the Environmental Observatory System (Eos) Mission in the late 1990’s. The SAGE III instrument follows a long heritage of successful flight missions such as the SAM II, SAGE I, and SAGE II missions in producing global data sets of stratospheric aerosol, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and water vapor. One of the unique characteristics of the SAGE III instrument is the ability to provide measurements of oxygen A-band absorption at the 760 nm spectral region. Oxygen A-band absorption measurements will provide independent pressure and temperature data for the retrieval of other constituents as measured by the SAGE III instrument.