Feasibility study for joint retrieval of air density and ozone in the stratosphere and mesosphere with the limb-scan technique

Abstract

Air density is a key sensing object for its high variability especially in the mesosphere, and ozone plays an important role in the physical, chemical, and radiant processes in the atmosphere system. Therefore it is essential to obtain their global vertical distributions jointly with high precision and vertical resolution. There is little work on joint retrieval of air density and ozone distributions using the ultraviolet limb-scan technique, although much work has been done on ozone measurement. Numerical simulations of joint air density and ozone retrieval in the middle atmosphere (20-90 km) are carried out using limb-scattered radiances at four bands (255, 300, 320, and 340 nm). Results show that joint retrieval of dual parameters using the limb-scan technique is feasible with high precision in nearly the whole region concerned, where air density and ozone have a precision of 1%-2% and 3%-5%, respectively, provided that high measurement precision and accurate correction of multiple-scattered radiance at long ultraviolet bands are ensured.