Abstract

The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) has been selected for definition study for NASA's Polar Orbiting Platform (NPOP) and NASA's Space Station Attached Payload (SSAP). These are both part of the Agency’s Earth Observing System (Eos) for making long-term observations to understand the complex processes that affect global change. SAGE III is the latest generation of SAGE flight instruments, all of which use solar occultation to make vertical profiles of aerosols, ozone, and NO₂, and to detect mid- to upper tropospheric clouds. SAGE II added, as will SAGE III, the capability to measure H₂O. A description of the evolution of these experiments which began with the Stratospheric Aerosol Measurement I and II (SAM I and II) missions is given in Table 1.

© 1990 Optical Society of America