NSF Award
0910920
The HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) program will provide global, meridional coverage of important carbon cycle and green house gases via vertical profiles throughout the depth of the troposphere. This will enable closure and inversion of global budgets of these critical gases (such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane), as well as related long-lived tracers and their ratios. This program will provide the first comprehensive, global survey of atmospheric trace gases, covering the full troposphere in all seasons and multiple years. The Microwave Temperature Profiler (MTP) can make an important contribution to HIPPO because it provides meteorological context for the other measurements by identifying the height of the tropopause.<br/><br/>These measurements will be used to understand tracer/tropopause conundrums. An added benefit of the MTP measurements is that they can also be used identify isentropes - the streamlines on which air parcels flow. (This is done by converting the temperature profile to a potential temperature profile, and then identifying on successive profiles the height of a specific potential temperature value.) This allows the presence of atmospheric waves to be identified, which could further facilitate the interpretation of other measurements. Finally, since oceanic regions are notoriously radiosonde sparse, the MTP temperature profiles will fill this void and allow better initialization of atmospheric chemistry models.
