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HIRDLS Instrument Science
Overall science goals of HIRDLS are to observe the global distributions of temperature and several trace species in the stratosphere and upper troposphere at high vertical and horizontal resolution. Specific issues to be investigated include:
- Fluxes of mass and chemical constituents between the troposphere and stratosphere [stratosphere-troposphere exchange (STE)];
- chemical processes, transport, and mixing [particularly in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UT/LS)];
- momentum, energy, heat, and potential vorticity balances of the upper troposphere and middle atmosphere;
- geographically and seasonally unbiased long-term climatologies and interannual variability of middle-atmosphere temperature, constituents, dynamical fields, and gravity waves;
- global distributions and interannual variations of aerosols, cirrus, and PSCs;
- tropospheric cloud-top heights;
- tropospheric temperature and water vapor retrievals (by providing high-resolution limb data for joint retrieval with EOS nadir sounders); and
- diagnostic studies of atmospheric dynamics, chemistry, and transport processes, down to small spatial scales, to test and improve models of these processes.
Although HIRDLS lost is azimuth scanning capability, much of the science can be retained through the use of chemical transport and data assimilation models.
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