Abstract

Spectrally resolved infrared radiance profiles of the Earth's limb can be inverted to obtain vertical distributions of temperature and species concentration. The atmosphere below approximately 70 km, where LTE prevails and the undissociated CO₂ distribution is known, can be probed using broadband limb measurements, as demonstrated by House and Ohring (1969), Gille et al (1975), Russell et al (1979), and others. The added dimension of spectral resolution offers the potential of obtaining umambiguous information in the non-LTE altitude regime. Zachor, Sharma, Nadile and Stair (1981), hereafter referred to as ZSNS, used a direct nonlinear technique to recover vertical profiles of excited nitric oxide concentration and kinetic temperature above 100 km altitude from spectral data obtained by the rocket-borne SPIRE CVF spectrometer (cf. Nadile et al (1977) and Stair et al (1981)).

© 1983 Optical Society of America