Abstract

Satellite sensing of the troposphere is an increasingly important issue as the need to understand man's impact on the atmosphere and the political pressure to further regulate gas emissions heightens. However, remote sensing of the troposphere and interpretation of such observations are challenging tasks. The nature of the troposphere with its "point" and distributed gas source regions (of natural and anthropogenic origin), complicated transport processes, and complex photochemistry results in large spatial and temporal variability. Thus our understanding of the troposphere would be greatly enhanced with remote observations that simultaneously achieve high spatial and temporal resolution. Although low earth orbit (LEO) sensors can achieve high spatial resolution (<50 × 50km), their temporal resolution (1 day or more) handicaps the investigation of important processes having time scales on the order of hours. The "global picture" afforded by a LEO sensor (even one that revisits the same spot on earth every 24 hours) is a convolution of the true but rapidly changing tropospheric "picture" with the highly restricted time/space view afforded by the LEO sensor. This viewing perspective further complicates the interpretation of the already complex troposphere.

© 1997 Optical Society of America