Validation of first chemistry mode retrieval results from new limb-imaging FTS GLORIA with correlative MIPAS-STR observations

We report first chemistry mode retrieval results from the new airborne limb-imaging infrared FTS (Fourier transform spectrometer) GLORIA and comparisons with observations by the conventional airborne limb-scanning infrared FTS MIPAS-STR. For GLORIA, the flights aboard the high-altitude research aircraft M55 Geophysica during the ESSenCe campaign (ESa Sounder Campaign 2011) were the very first in field deployment after several years of development. The simultaneous observations of GLORIA and MIPAS-STR during the flight on 16 December 2011 inside the polar vortex and under the conditions of optically partially transparent polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) provided us the unique opportunity to compare the observations by two different infrared FTS generations directly. The retrieval results of temperature, HNO3, O3, H2O, CFC-11 and CFC-12 show reasonable agreement of GLORIA with MIPAS-STR and collocated in-situ observations. For the horizontally binned hyperspectral limb-images, the GLORIA sampling outnumbered the horizontal cross-track sampling of MIPAS-STR by up to one order of magnitude. Depending on the target parameter, typical vertical resolutions of 0.5 to 2.0 km were obtained for GLORIA and are typically by factors of 2 to 4 better compared to MIPAS-STR. ... mehrWhile the improvement of the performance, characterisation and data processing of GLORIA are subject of ongoing work, the presented first results already demonstrate the considerable gain in sampling and vertical resolution achieved with GLORIA.