Abstract

The Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) will derive Stratospheric temperatures and constituent number densities from the measurement of infrared spectral emissions, during its 18 month mission on board the NASA Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS). Overviews of the CLAES experiment and hardware are given by Roche et al (Ref 1) and Burriesci et al. (Ref 2). CLAES earthlimb spectral measurements consist of discrete narrow band spectral measurements within a spectral micro-window defined by a some what broader band blocker filter. The narrow spectral channels are of the order 0.2 to 0.6 cm-1, depending on spectral region. The blocker filter bands are of the order 3 to 12 cm-1. There are 9 blocker regions spaced across the range 3.5 to 12 micrometers wavelength. The blocker regions are selected for retrieval of HCI (^~ 2843 cm-1), NO (^~ 1897 cm-1), H2O and NO2 (^~ 1605 cm-1), CH4, N2O, and N2O5 (^~ 1257 cm-1), F12 (^~925 cm-1), HNO3 (879 cm-1), F11 (843 cm-1), temperature (CO2) and 03 (^~792 cm-1) and ClONO2 (780 cm-1).

© 1990 Optical Society of America