Exospheric Temperature Measured by NASA-GOLD Under Low Solar Activity: Comparison With Other Data Sets.

Exospheric temperature is one of the key parameters in constructing thermospheric models and has been extensively studied with in situ observations and remote sensing. The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) at a geosynchronous vantage point provides dayglow limb images for two longitude sectors, from which we can estimate the terrestrial exospheric temperature since 2018. In this paper, we investigate climatological behavior of the exospheric temperature measured by GOLD. The temperature has positive correlations with solar and geomagnetic activity and exhibits a morning-afternoon asymmetry, both of which agree with previous studies. We have found that the arithmetic sum of F10.7 (solar) and Ap (geomagnetic) indices is highly correlated with the exospheric temperature, explaining ∼64% of the day-to-day variability. Furthermore, the exospheric temperature has good correlation with thermospheric parameters (e.g., neutral temperature, O2 density, and NO emission index) sampled at various heights above ∼130 km, in spite of the well-known thermal gradient below ∼200 km. However, thermospheric temperature at altitudes around 100 km is not well correlated with the GOLD exospheric temperature. The result implies that effects other than thermospheric heating by solar Extreme Ultraviolet and geomagnetic activity take control below a threshold altitude that exists between ∼100 and ∼130 km.

Simulations of the accuracy in retrieving stratospheric aerosol effective radius, composition, and loading from infrared spectral transmission measurements.

We examine the extent to which three physical aerosol parameters--effective radius, composition (sulfate weight percent), and total volume-can be determined from infrared transmission spectra. Using simulated transmission data over the range 800-4750 cm(-1) (12.5-2.1 microm) and errors taken from the infrared spectral measurements of the Atmospheric Trace Molecule Spectroscopy (ATMOS) instrument, we use optimal estimation to recover these aerosol parameters. Uncertainties in these are examined as a function of the size, composition, and loading of stratospheric aerosols and of the spectral range employed. Using the entire spectral range above, we retrieve all three parameters with a precision to within 3% if the size distribution form is known. Additional errors result, however, from an uncertainty in the size distribution width. These are small (only a few percent) for composition and total volume but are substantial (as much as 50%) for effective radius. Errors also increase substantially when the spectral range is reduced. The retrieved effective radius can have an error of 100% or greater for typical stratospheric aerosol sizes when the spectral range is restricted to the lower wavenumber part of the range. For good accuracy in effective radius, the spectral range must extend beyond approximately 3000 cm(-1). Composition and total volume are less sensitive to the spectral range than effective radius. These simulations were carried out with modeled data to test the potential accuracy of stratospheric sulfate aerosol retrievals from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE). Because of the limitations that result from the use of simulated data, we have tested our retrieval algorithm using ATMOS spectra in different filter regions and present here the aerosol parameters obtained.