Abstract
Spectral limb radiances measured by the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) onboard the Envisat Environmental research satellite are characterized in terms of instrument line shape (ILS), noise equivalent spectral radiance (NESR) and possible impact of non-local thermodynamic equilibrium emission in deep space calibration spectra. Furthermore, it is assessed if the operational processing baseline to set the top of the model atmosphere to 120~km is justified. The major findings are: The ILS parametrization provided along with the measurement data is sub-optimal; spectral residuals can be reduced by application of an ILS correction function. Spectral noise as estimated in this study is systematically lower than the values provided along with the measurement data. There is no evidence for significant noise correlations in the spectral domain. There is no indication of non-local thermodynaic equilibrium induced upper atmospheric signal in the so-called 'deep-space' spectra which are used for the radiometric zero-level calibration.
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