Technique to retrieve solar EUV flux and neutral thermospheric O, O{sub 2}, N{sub 2} and temperature from airglow measurements

Conference · Sat Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:227952

Fennelly, J A; Germany, G A; Torr, D G; Richards, P G ^[1]; Torr, M R ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Alabama, Huntsville, AL (United States)
2. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL (United States). Payload Projects Office

The authors describe a method for retrieving neutral thermospheric composition and solar EUV flux from optical measurements of the O+({sup 2}P) 732 nm and O({sup 1}D) 630 nm airglow emissions. The parameters retrieved are the neutral temperature, the O, O{sub 2}, and N{sub 2} density profiles, and a scaling factor for the solar EUV flux spectrum. The temperature, solar EUV flux scaling factor, and atomic oxygen density are first retrieved from the 732 nm emission, which are then used with the 630 nm emission to retrieve the O{sub 2} and N{sub 2} densities. Between the altitudes of 200 and 400 km the retrieval technique is able to statistically retrieve values to within 3.1% for thermospheric temperature, 3.3% for atomic oxygen, 2.3% for molecular oxygen, and 2.4% for molecular nitrogen. The solar EUV flux scaling factor has a retrieval error of 5.1%. They also present the results of retrievals using existing data taken from both groundbased and spacebased instruments. These include airglow data taken by the Visible Airglow Experiment on the Atmosphere Explorer spacecraft and the Imaging Spectrometric Observatory flown on the ATLAS 1 shuttle mission in 1992.

• OSTI ID: 227952
• Report Number(s): CONF-940723--; ISBN 0-8194-1590-1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

66 PHYSICS
AIRGLOW
ALGORITHMS
CHEMICAL COMPOSITION
DATA
DATA ANALYSIS
ELECTRON DENSITY
EMISSION SPECTRA
EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET SPECTRA
NITROGEN
OXYGEN IONS
REMOTE SENSING
SOLAR FLUX
SPECTROMETERS
TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENT
THERMOSPHERE