OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments 1595
Optical Remote Sensing Instruments
G G Shepherd, York University, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada
Copyright 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
Atmospheric radiation originates with the Sun. Ab-
sorption of solar radiation by the Earth’s surface, and
by water vapor and ozone in the lower atmosphere,
warms the atmosphere, causing the emission of
thermal infrared radiation at wavelengths correspond-
ing to the spectral lines of infrared-active species. Solar
radiation is also reflected from the Earth, and is
scattered in the atmosphere, through both molecular
scattering, called Rayleigh scattering, and scattering
by particulate matter, called Mie scattering. Thus the
atmosphere contains a mixture of radiation that
is essentially scattered and reflected sunlight, and
thermal emission from the atmosphere.
The solar spectrum also contains ultraviolet radia-
tion covering a wide range of wavelengths. Radiation
in the extreme ultraviolet region (EUV) is absorbed
high in the atmosphere, above about 130 km, through
the ionization of atmospheric species. The resulting
excited species undergo ion–molecule reactions, or
recombine with thermal electrons, releasing the stored
energy as photons, mainly in the visible region.
Similarly, far ultraviolet (FUV) radiation in the Schu-
mann–Runge continuum dissociates molecular oxy-
gen into atomic form above about 120 km.This atomic
oxygen is long-lived, and does not recombine until it
has diffused or is otherwise mixed downward into the
more dense atmosphere near 100 km, where it under-
goes the reaction O þ O þ M ! On2 þ M. The On2
exchanges energy with atomic oxygen, producing
O(1S) metastable oxygen, which radiates the atomic
oxygen green line at 557.7 nm. This radiation, along
with the photons released by similar reactions, con-
stitutes the airglow, a further component of upper
atmospheric radiation.
All of this radiation carries diagnostic information
about the atmosphere, since thermal radiation is a
function of the temperature and of the species’
concentrations, following the equations of blackbody
radiation. If the species has a known mixing ratio
(fractional concentration in the atmosphere), as is the
case for CO2 , the temperature may be determined;
conversely, if the temperature is known, the concen-
trations of variable minor constituents may be
determined. The oxygen green line, and similar
airglow lines, carry information about the ambient
temperature from their width, and about wind
from their Doppler shifts. Thus, remote sensing
provides a great deal of fundamental information
about the atmosphere. This article is concerned
with the conceptual description of atmospheric
remote sensing instruments, and the factors involved
in choosing the best instrument for a particular
application.
The Scope of Remote Sensing
One-dimensional observations of the atmosphere
provide integrals of the emission along the line-of-
sight, called the integrated emission rate, or more
generally the radiance. This is the flux of photons (or
energy) per unit area per unit solid angle. The one-
dimensional measurement one would like is the
vertical profile of volume emission rate, the number
of photons emitted (or scattered) per unit volume
per unit time, as a function of altitude. This can be
done in several ways. If a rocket is flown up through
the atmosphere, the integrated emission rate above
the rocket decreases as it rises. The derivative of
the observed signal gives the volume emission rate; this
works well, but a rocket flight is an expensive way to
obtain a single atmospheric profile. Looking down
from a satellite into the atmosphere, different wave-
lengths of thermal infrared radiation appear to arise
from different altitudes, because of atmospheric
absorption. A strong emitter is also a strong absorber,
so that strong emissions viewed at the satellite must
originate high in the atmosphere, while weak emis-
sions originate lower in the atmosphere where the
density is larger. Thus, by using a selection of different
wavelengths, one can obtain vertical profiles from
downward (nadir) viewing. Another method is to view
the atmosphere at the limb, as shown in Figure 1,
where the line-of-sight is tangent to the observed
atmosphere, for a continuous range of tangent alti-
tudes, either by scanning the field of view up and down
or by taking an image. Each line-of-sight observation
at a given altitude is an integral equation of the
emission rates, but the set of equations can be inverted
to yield vertical profiles of volume emission rate. If
absorption occurs along the viewing path, this must be
taken into account. Figure 2A shows the limb radiance
observed for the HNO3 species with the CLAES
instrument on the UARS satellite (more information
later in the section). Figure 2B shows its inversion to
1596 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments
Satellite
Field of view
Atmospheric layers
Earth
Figure 1 Illustrating limb viewing of the atmosphere from a
satellite.
species concentration, expressed as mixing ratio in
parts per billion (10
9) by volume.
There are different kinds of two-dimensional infor-
mation: vertical–horizontal: and horizontal–horizon-
tal. The first involves a vertical cut through the
atmosphere, which is obtained by taking repeated
limb images as the satellite moves along the track. In
this case the inversion yields horizontal as well as
vertical information, through a retrieval process
known as tomography, analogous to the well-known
methods of medical imaging. Horizontal–horizontal
information may be obtained by taking nadir obser-
vations with a satellite over a single day, providing a
global map. If limb images are used, providing vertical
50
40
Altitude (km)
30
20
10
10−9 10−8 10−7
(A) Radiance (W cm−2 sr cm−1)
Figure 2 Integrated emission rate profile of HNO3 (A) and the inverted volume emission rate profile, expressed as mixing ratio in parts
per billion (10
9) by volume (B). (Courtesy of A. Roche, Lockheed Research Center.
profiles, then the information is in principle three-
dimensional, though at low resolution because of the
gaps between the orbits.
Responsivity and Superiority
The responsivity of an optical system is the ratio of the
instrument output signal to the input radiance: the
higher the responsivity the higher the signal, for a
given radiance. To achieve the desired atmospheric
diagnostics, it turns out that instruments of the highest
responsivity must be sought, and the challenge be-
comes how to choose the best instrument for a given
application from the wide range that is available.
Several factors are involved in this. The responsivity is
given by R ¼ AOtq, where A is the area of the
instrument aperture, normally the area of the first
optical element, and O is the solid angle of the
measurement field of view. For an imaging detector,
this is the solid angle corresponding to one pixel. t is
the instrument transmittance and q is the quantum
efficiency of the detector, the percentage of the arriving
photons that are converted to electrons. However, all
spectroscopic devices involve angular dispersion, such
that a change in the angle of the ray entering the
instrument causes a change in the detected wave-
length. This means that for the measurement of a
narrow wavelength interval, the field of view must be
restricted. Resolving power, <, is defined as l=dl,
where dl is the size of the resolution element. Because
50
40
Altitude (km)
30
20
10
10−6 10−5 0 5 10 15
(B) HNO3 mixing ratio [ppbv]
 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments 1597
of dispersion, the higher the resolving power,
the smaller the field of view, and the smaller the
responsivity. It turns out that for all conventional
spectroscopic instruments these quantities are inverse-
ly related, so that O< 5 constant for a given instru-
ment. However, O< is not the same for different
instruments, so it may be used to compare the
performance of different instruments; here it is
called the superiority (similarly to what was termed
by Jacquinot the luminosity–resolving–power prod-
uct, LRP). In general the instruments of highest
superiority are the most advantageous for atmospheric
remote sensing.
However other factors concerning the mode of
operation are involved. A photometer is an instrument
that records the radiance measured through its spec-
tral passband F effectively a filter. A scanning
spectrometer records the radiances of adjacent spec-
tral elements successively in time, which is an ineffi-
cient process, since all of the photons not being
measured at a given time are wasted. Spectral multi-
plexers are devices that measure all wavelengths
simultaneously. One way of doing this is to use an
array detector, in which the photons corresponding to
different spectral elements fall on different pixels, and
are measured simultaneously. Another way is through
the use of a Fourier transform spectrometer, in which
each wavelength element is coded with a cosinusoid of
a different frequency, and all cosinusoids are super-
posed in one signal. A Fourier transform of the signal
then separates out the different frequencies, and thus
the spectral elements. A third class of instrument is the
modulator, in which a range of wavelengths falls on
the detector, but only one spectral element is modu-
lated. This can be done, for example, by using a gas
absorption cell as a selective absorber for specific
wavelengths, and varying the pressure in the cell to
modulate the selected wavelengths.
Atmospheric Imagers
As indicated in previous sections, atmospheric remote
sensing instruments often have single fields of view,
and are essentially radiometers of various spectral
resolutions. If such a device is used with a scanning
mirror to scan up and down the limb, for example, it
might be called a scanning radiometer. If it makes a
raster-type scan so as to cover two dimensions, then it
might be called an imager.
Imaging from satellites was an early goal of the
space age. If a satellite spins, with its spin axis in the
plane of the orbit and parallel to the Earth’s surface,
then a radiometer viewing perpendicular to the spin
axis scans from one side of the Earth to the other,
beneath the satellite. As the satellite moves forward,
successive scans may be made adjacent to one another,
generating an image. Such devices are very attractive,
because simple radiometers become imagers through
the motion and rotation of the satellite, which does not
involve any complex mechanical motions in the device
itself; this approach was used in early weather satel-
lites. However, there is a very severe penalty, as the
responsivity of the instrument varies as the fourth
power of the spatial resolution, which drastically
limits high-resolution observations.
The advent of array detectors changed all this.
Limited space precludes a description of array detec-
tors in general, but the most widely known, both
domestically and scientifically is the CCD, the charge-
coupled device. A CCD is a device based on a silicon
substrate, in which pixels are formed by conductive
layers whose voltages are controlled. During image
exposure, electrons released from the silicon are
trapped in their corresponding pixels by the electric
potentials. During readout the electrons from one
pixel are shifted to the next by lowering and raising the
potential barriers. This is done on a row-by-row basis
so that all the charges are eventually brought to the
edge of the chip. There they are captured in a
horizontal shift register, and then shifted pixel-by-
pixel to an output register in which the accumulated
charge is measured and digitized, before being trans-
mitted and recorded. In this ingenious way, a
10001000 device containing one million pixels is
read out through a single output channel.
CCD devices have high quantum efficiency in the
visible region, and this is being extended into the
ultraviolet. The same cannot be done in the infrared,
but infrared detectors may be bonded on a pixel-to-
pixel basis to CCD-type multiplexers which are used
to read the signals out. Visible-region CCDs also have
low dark currents (the signal levels produced through
thermal release of electrons in the system), particularly
if they are cooled to modest temperatures, such as

501C. There is also a readout noise associated with
the output amplifier, but this noise is very low in
devices available at present. In short, the CCD is close
to being a perfect detector, beyond which no improve-
ment will be possible.
With a camera consisting of a lens and array
detector at its focal point, it is much more efficient
not to spin the satellite but to fix its orientation so that
the imager may be continuously locked on the target,
and the image integrated as long as is desired to obtain
the wanted signal-to-noise ratio. Such a satellite needs
to be accurately oriented through three-axis stabiliza-
tion, but this is now a routine procedure for satellites.
Other interesting configurations are possible. For
example, if the host satellite must spin, for any reason,
it is still possible to use a CCD imager effectively using
1598 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments
the TDI (timedelay–integrate) mode. In this, the rows
of charges are continuously shifted at a rate that
compensates for the image motion caused by the
rotation of the satellite. Thus the radiance from a
single parcel in the atmosphere is integrated while the
image moves from one side of the CCD to the other,
yielding a much longer exposure time than would
otherwise be available. The same method can be used
in a moving aircraft.
The Fabry–Perot Spectrometer
The Fabry–Perot spectrometer has been in use for
more than a hundred years, since the first exploration
of its properties. The Fabry–Perot etalon consists of
two adjacent surfaces having surfaces with reflectivity
somewhat less than unity, forming a cavity within
which multiple reflections take place; it is a multiple-
beam interferometer. Where the multiple reflections
are in phase the transmitted signal is strong, and where
they are out of phase the light is reflected. Thus the
etalon acts as a filter, transmitting wavelength l, as
given by the equation ml ¼ 2nt cos y, where m is the
order of interference, n is the refractive index of the
cavity medium, normally air, t is the thickness of the
cavity, and y is the angle of the ray with the etalon
normal, measured inside the cavity. For most applica-
tions the order of interference varies from about 1000
(low-resolution application) to 100 000 (high-resolu-
tion application). The interference filter is a particular
type of low-resolution etalon, so the Fabry–Perot
etalon is in fact very widely used. For each value of
m; l is different; thus the etalon has a spectral
transmittance resembling a comb, with passbands
equally separated in the spectrum by an amount
known as the free spectral range. These multiple
passbands must be dealt with in some way if the
spectrum is to be measured unambiguously. Since l is a
constant for constant y, the transmitted radiation for a
given wavelength/order forms a ring of constant y
about the etalon normal. Each order produces a ring of
a different radius, forming the familiar Fabry–Perot
ring pattern.
The shape of the spectral passband function (its
overall transmittance T) is best expressed in terms of
wavenumber, s ¼ l
1 , where r is the individual plate
reflectance, t is its transmittance, and d is the optical
path difference of the etalon ð2ntÞ. TðsÞ is given by
eqn [1].
½t=ð1
rÞ2
TðsÞ ¼ ½1
1 þ ½4r=ð1
rÞ2 = sin2 psd
This is shown in Figure 3, for an air-spaced etalon of
2.5 cm spacing having r ¼ 0:9; the free spectral range
1.0
0.8
Transmittance
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Wavenumber (cm−1)
Figure 3 Multiple passbands for a Fabry–Perot spectrometer
with an air-spaced etalon of 2.5 cm spacing, reflectance of 0.9, and
a finesse of 29.8; the free spectral range is 0.2 cm
1.
is 0.2 cm
1. The full width at half-maximum (FWHM)
is equal to the free spectral range divided by the finesse
F, which for Figure 3 is equal to 29.8. Finesse is given
by eqn [2].
pffiffi
Free spectral range p r
F¼ ¼ ½2
FWHM 1
r
Because the finesse is a constant for a given etalon, the
spectral bandwidth is set by adjusting the etalon
separation. This flexibility is one of the advantages of
the Fabry–Perot spectrometer, which in its simplest
form is just an etalon followed by a lens, with a circular
aperture at its focal point and a detector behind it.
However, to produce a spectrum the etalon must be
scanned. According to ml ¼ 2nt cos y, to change l
one must change n or t or y. n can be changed by
changing the gas pressure in an air-spaced etalon.
For a high-resolution etalon, about one atmosphere
(B101 kPa) of pressure change is required to scan the
spectrum by one order; this was a common technique
for ground-based instruments. Varying t involves the
mechanical movement of one of the etalon plates; in
current instruments this is done with piezoelectric
positioners cemented between the plates. For high
accuracy, capacitors are used to sense the position and
control the piezoelectric voltage in a feedback system.
This method works well at high or low resolution,
since a movement of l=2 causes a scan through one free
spectral range.
Finally, l can be changed by changing y, and this is
readily achieved through the use of an array detector,
in which radial distance is equivalent to wavelength,
though with a quadratic scale. However, this has the
very nice consequence that equal spectral widths
correspond to equal areas on the detector array. The
disadvantage of this approach is that the rings become
 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments 1599

very narrow at the edges of the array, requiring small
pixels, and in the readout, the readout noise is
accumulated for each pixel. This limitation has been
circumvented through the use of CLIO (circle to line
imaging optical system), in which a hollow cone is
used to image the circular fringes into straight lines
that correspond to the pixel layout on the CCD.
Because the CCD charges can be binned, that is, added
together in a noise-free way on the chip before
reaching the output register, this reduces the noise
significantly in the final spectrum.
The superiority of the Fabry–Perot spectrometer is
equal to 2pn2 , a factor of 50 greater than for a typical
grating spectrometer which is in turn a factor of about
5 greater than for the prism spectrometer.
The Michelson Interferometer
The Michelson interferometer is fundamentally the
simplest interferometer, having just two beams, creat-
ed in a beamsplitter as shown in Figure 4A, which
recombine and are registered at the detector. The
output signal is recorded as a function of the optical
path difference in the interferometer, which is meas-
ured from zero to some maximum value as one of the
mirrors is moved. This signal is called an interfero-
gram. For a monochromatic signal of infinitesimal
linewidth, the output is simply a cosinusoid of
constant amplitude whose signal period corresponds
to the wavelength, one cycle for every l=2 of mirror
motion. If the spectral line has a finite width, then the
amplitude of the cosinusoid decays with increasing
optical path difference because the different compo-
nents of the line begin to get out of phase. If the
spectrum contains two different wavelengths, there
will be two cosinusoids of different periods and these
will be superposed; for a complex spectrum many
cosinuoids will be superposed. The spectrum there-
fore may be retrieved by a Fourier transform as in
eqn [3], where D is the optical path difference of the
interferometer.
Z 1
SðsÞ ¼ IðDÞ cosð2psDÞ dD ½3

1
In actual practice it is more complicated than this. The
interferogram cannot be measured to infinity, but only
to some Dmax . A real instrument will have dispersion in
its optical elements, so that the cosinusoids are phase-
shifted by an amount that is dependent on wavelength,
and the phase must be retrieved. This can be done by
measuring from
Dmax to þDmax and doing both sine
and cosine transforms, but this is an inefficient
process. It is preferable and feasible to use a small
part of the interferogram about zero optical path
difference to determine the phase shifts, and to use this
to create a corrected interferogram that is symmetric
about zero, and for which a cosine transform may be
used.
The Michelson interferometer has the interesting
property that it can be field-widened. If the arms of the
interferometer of lengths t1 and t2 contain materials of
refractive index n1 and n2 respectively, then the optical
path difference as a function of off-axis angle meas-
ured outside the interferometer is given by eqn [4].
 
D sin2 i t1 t2
¼ n1 t1
n2 t2


2 2 n1 n2
 
sin4 i t1 t2


3 þ  ½4
8 n31 n2

M2
M2
M′2
t

n
Beamsplitter
Beamsplitter

Light In M1
Light In
(A) (B) M1

Figure 4 (A) The ordinary Michelson interferometer set to zero optical path difference; the emergent rays are colinear and the path
difference is independent of incident angle. (B) A field-widened Michelson interferometer with refractive material in one arm; the emergent
rays are colinear because of apparemt reflection at the virtual mirror M2 and the optical path difference is independent of incident angle to
fourth order, but there is an optical path difference.
1600 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments
Figure 4A shows an ordinary Michelson interferom-
eter set to zero optical path difference; the rays emerge
colinearly, making the optical path difference inde-
pendent of angle. In Figure 4B, an optical difference is
introduced through the use of refractive material in the
arms, but the rays still emerge colinearly because t1 n2
has been made equal to t2 n1 , causing the term in sin2 i
to vanish. The path difference is thus independent of
angle to fourth order as indicated above, creating a
wide field of uniform path difference.
For the ordinary Michelson interferometer the term
in sin2 i dominates, which is the same as for the Fabry–
Perot spectrometer when the term ð1
cos yÞ is
approximated. This is why these devices have quad-
ratic angular dispersion. With dispersion of fourth
order, the optical path difference changes very slowly
with angle. This creates a very large O, and a
superiority that is not fixed but increases with
increasing spectral resolution and is equal to
4pn2 <1=2 . Such field-widened instruments have
much higher responsivity at high spectral resolution
than other instruments, but the concept is difficult to
implement since it requires varying the thickness of
refractive materials. For that reason its use has been
limited to very specific applications.
Applications to Current Missions
NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite
(UARS), launched on 12 September 1991 and still
operating in orbit in 2002, carries ten instruments,
many of which use the concepts that have been
described. The Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spec-
trometer (CLAES) makes use of solid low-resolution
etalons (resolution about 0.65 cm
1) to observe ther-
mal emission from the atmosphere over a wavelength
range from 3.5 to 13 mm. Four etalons are mounted in
a paddle wheel, allowing them to be sequentially
inserted into the instrument beam, but also to make a
sequence of measurements with one etalon at small
angular increments, providing a wavelength scan for
each filter. Results were shown in Figure 2 for one of
the measured species; it also obtained temperature
from observations of CO2 .
The Improved Stratosphere and Mesosphere Sound-
er (ISAMS) is a pressure-modulated radiometer, which
also measured thermal emission from the Earth’s limb.
The Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE), uses
both filter and gas cell absorption channels. However,
it does not measure thermal emission from the atmos-
phere but rather atmospheric absorption of sunlight,
by viewing the Sun at the Earth’s limb, a method
known as solar occultation. The absorption technique
is very accurate because it is self-calibrating, but it
restricts the observations to the one sunrise and the one
sunset that occur on each orbit, normally fifteen of
each on a given day at the UARS altitude of 585 km.
The fourth species-measuring instrument is the
Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), which is not an
optical instrument but a submillimeter-wave radiom-
eter measuring at the frequencies of 63, 183, and 205
GHz. However, the distinction between radio wave
and optical wave techniques is blurred, as Michelson
interferometers can reach into the submillimeter
region, and radio frequencies are now as high as 600
GHz, which overlaps this.
The UARS satellite carries two instruments that
measure atmospheric winds. The first of these is the
High Resolution Doppler Imager (HRDI), a train of
three Fabry–Perot etalons of different free spectral
ranges, which are arranged to suppress all but a single
passband. A multianode detector is used, with 30
annular elements in a single device, that correspond to
Fabry–Perot rings, thus providing 30 spectral elements.
This provides the scanning of the high-resolution
etalon, which has a fixed spacing. The medium- and
low-resolution etalons are scanned using piezoelectric
drivers to align their passbands. From 60 km up to
110 km, winds are measured using airglow emission
from the O2 Atm band. Below 50 km, the shifts of O2
absorption lines seen in scattered sunlight are used to
determine winds in the stratosphere. The Wind Imag-
ing Interferometer (WINDII) uses a field-widened
Michelson interferometer of quasi-fixed optical path
difference to measure winds from different airglow
emissions covering the range 80–300 km.The field
widening allows an imaging CCD detector to be used,
which images the full altitude range of the atmosphere
as viewed at the limb. The refractive materials are
chosen to provide not only field widening, but also
achromaticity of the field widening, thermal stability of
the optical path difference, and achromaticity of the
thermal stability. Both HRDI and WINDII have been
very successful and agree well with each other in the
altitude range in which they overlap. Combined results
from the two instruments are shown in Figure 5.
The Future
The concepts described here are capable of further
development, and these and other ideas are being and
will be exploited in other missions. The Odin satellite,
launched in February 2001, carries two instruments,
one a submillimeter wave radiometer extending up to
580 GHz, intended to measure chlorine, nitrogen, and
hydrogen species, including H2O, H18 2 O, CO, and O3.
The other instrument is a grating spectrograph that
measures the spectrum of scattered sunlight, which
contains the absorption signature of atmospheric
species. While grating spectrographs have not been
 OPTICS, ATMOSPHERIC / Optical Remote Sensing Instruments 1601

200 40 80

40

60
180

40
20
40
20

40
160 0

20

North−south wind speed (m s−1)

0

(positive numbers northward)

40

60

0
140 20

20
−20 0
Altitude (km) 120 20 0
40
0 −20 −40 20
0 20
20 40 −20 0
100 40
−40
0
0
80 −20 0 0
20

−20
0
−2

0
60 0 0
−40
40 0 0 0 0
0
20 0 0

0 −80
60° W 40° W 20° W 0° 20° E 40° E 60° E
Latitude

Figure 5 Meridional winds as a function of latitude and altitude for a local time of noon as measured by the HRDI and WINDII instruments
on NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. The cellular structure on both sides of the Equator is the signature of the diurnal tide
which is produced near the Earth’s surface by solar heating but then propagates upward. The amplitude increases as the atmospheric
density decreases, so that the tides become very large near 100 km; above about 120 km it rapidly dissipates. (Prepared by the late
M. D. Burrage, courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center UARS Project.)

described here, they are suitable where the observed See also
radiance is large, and a wide spectral range of modest
Observations for Chemistry (Remote Sensing): IR/
resolution is desired. The TIMED satellite launched FIR; Lidar; Microwave. Satellite Remote Sensing: Aer-
December 2001 carries among other thermosphere osol Measurements; Cloud Properties; GPS Meteorology;
and mesosphere instruments a single-etalon Fabry– Precipitation; Surface Wind; TOMS Ozone; Temperature
Perot spectrometer that uses the CLIO type of detector, Soundings; Water Vapor; Wind, Middle Atmosphere.
for the measurement of winds.
The MOPITT instrument, launched on the Terra
satellite in December 1999 is a length-modulated
Further Reading
radiometer intended to measure CO in the tropo- Baker D (1977) In: Vanasse G (ed.) Spectrometric Tech-
sphere. A Fourier transform spectrometer called AT- niques, vol. 1. New York: Academic Press.
MOS has been flown several times on the Space Shuttle Bose DN (1995) Photodetectors. In: Jha SS (ed.) Perspectives
and obtained very high resolution absorption spectra in Optoelectronics. Singapore: World Scientific.
Chamberlain JW (1961) Physics of the Aurora and Airglow.
of the atmosphere in solar occultation mode. A much
New York: Academic Press.
smaller version of higher resolving power called ACE
Hernandez G (1986) Fabry–Perot Interferometers. Cam-
will be launched on the Canadian SciSat mission in bridge: Cambridge University Press.
2003, along with a diffraction grating spectrograph Houghton JT, Taylor FW and Rodgers CD (1984) Remote
called MAESTRO. A recent major launch was that of Sensing of Atmospheres. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
the European Space Agency Envisat, on March 1, sity Press.
2002. It carries two ambitious diffraction grating Jacquinot P (1950) New developments in interference spec-
instruments, GOMOS for stellar occultation and troscopy. Reports on Progress in Physics 23: 267–312.
SCIAMACHY for downward viewing, as well as McDade IC and Llewellyn EJ (1991) Inversion techniques
MIPAS for high resolution FT spectroscopy. Work is in for recovering the two-dimensional distributions of auroral
progress for the application of WINDII-type instru- emission rates from tomographic rocket photometer mea-
surements. Canadian Journal of Physics 69: 1059–1068.
ments for wind measurements in the mesosphere,
Rao PK, Holmes SJ, Anderson RK, et al. (eds) (1990)
using airglow, and in the stratosphere, using thermal
Weather Satellites: Systems, Data, and Environmental
emission from a minor constituent such as ozone. For Applications. Boston: American Meteorological Society.
winds in the troposphere, where pressure shifts and Salby ML (1996) Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics.
broadening are large, lidars must be used; the Euro- New York: Academic Press.
pean Space Agency (ESA) has such an Atmospheric Shepherd GG (2002) Spectral Imaging of the Atmosphere.
Dynamics Mission in the development phase. London: Academic Press.