Measurement of the UTLS Composition with Mmw Spectroscopy: MARSCHALS Results in Polar, Mid-Latitude and Tropical Regions
Dinelli, Bianca Maria1; Castelli, Elisa1; Del Bianco, Samuele2; Cortesi, Ugo2; Gai, Marco2; Gerber, Daniel3; Moyna, Brian3; Oldfield, Matthew3; Rea, Simon3; Siddans, Richard3; Kerridge, Brian3
1ISAC-CNR, ITALY; 2IFAC-CNR, ITALY; 3STFC-RAL, UNITED KINGDOM

MARSCHALS (Millimetre-wave Airborne Receivers for Spectroscopic CHaracterisation in Atmospheric Limb Sounding) is a limb viewing instrument working in the millimetre-wave spectral region. It has been developed as a demonstrator of the measurement capability of millimetre-wave in the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere (UTLS) region, a very interesting region of the Earth atmosphere poorly studied by satellite remote sensing instruments because of the extensive interference of the cloud coverage. MARSCHALS was deployed on board the M-55 Geophysica stratospheric aircraft in four measurement campaigns: the SCOUT-O3 Campaign from Darwin (Australia) in November-December 2005, the Test Campaign 2009 (TC9) from Oberpfaffenhofen (Germany) in November 2009, the Premier-Ex Campaign in March 2010 and the ESSenCe Campaign in December 2011 from Kiruna (Sweden). In these occasions, MARSCHALS measured the UTLS region at different latitudes and seasons, therefore testing its measurement capabilities in different atmospheric conditions. Here, we present the results of the analysis of MARSCHALS measurements acquired during the different campaigns using the MARC code. The MARC code has been developed under an ESA contract aiming at the best exploitation of MARSCHALS data. The SCOUT-O3 campaign in 2005 was the first successful measurement campaign of the MARSCHALS instrument, but only one of the three MARSCHALS spectral bands worked properly allowing the retrieval of Temperature, H2O, O3 and HNO3 vertical profiles from 7 to 26 km. During the other campaigns, due to instrument upgrades, data from all the three MARSCHALS bands were available for the analysis, allowing the retrieval of two additional species: N2O and CO. The measurement capability of MARSCHALS in any atmospheric condition are demonstrated through a thorough estimation of the quality of the retrieved profiles, evaluated using diagnostic quantifiers and validation with other instruments