MARSCHALS
Millimetre-Wave Airborne Receiver for Spectroscopic Characterisation of Atmospheric Limb Sounding
People: Martyn Chipperfield
Description
The upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UTLS) is a major focus for atmospheric research due to the importance of this region to climate radiative forcing, stratosphere/troposphere exchange, stratospheric ozone depletion and tropospheric chemistry. Therefore, our ability to observed chemical species in this region needs to be tested and improved.
In response to this growing need for information about the UTLS, the European Space Agency (ESA) has defined a programme to develop and deploy MARSCHALS, an airborne simulator for the proposed space-borne instrument MASTER. Development of the MARSCHALS instrument was lead by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and its primary objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of limb-sounding at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths.
We are involved in an ESA-funded study, coordinated by CNR ( Italy ), to obtain and assess UTLS observations with MARSCHALS. At Leeds we are performing simulations with the TOMCAT 3-D chemical transport model (CTM) to provide both reference data for the retrievals and for scientific comparisons
Start Date: Mar 2002
End Date: Mar 2007