HR: 08:00h
AN: A11A-01    [PDF]
TI: Contribution of TOMS to Earth Science - An Overview
AU: * Bhartia, P K
EM: pawan.bhartia@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail Code 916, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: The TOMS instrument was launched on the Nimbus-7 satellite in Oct 1978 with the goal of understanding the meteorological influences on the ozone column. The nominal lifetime of the instrument was 1 year. However, in response to the concern over possible man-made influences on the ozone layer NASA continued to nurse the instrument for 13.5 years and launched a major program to produce accurate trend quality dataset of ozone. Despite severe optical degradation and other significant anomalies that developed in the instrument over its lifetime, the effort turned out to be a tremendous success. In 1984, TOMS took center stage as the primary provider of Antarctic ozone hole maps to the world community; it continues to play that role until today. An unexpected benefit of the close attention paid to improving the TOMS data quality was that several atmospheric constituents that interfere with ozone measurement were also identified and meticulously converted into long-term datasets of their own. These constituents include clouds, volcanic SO2, aerosols, and ocean phytoplankton. In addition, the high quality of the basic datasets made it possible to produce global maps of surface UV and tropospheric ozone. In most cases there are no other sources of these data sets. Advanced UV instruments currently under development in the US and Europe will continue to exploit the TOMS-developed techniques for several decades.
DE: 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE
DE: 0305 Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801)
DE: 0340 Middle atmosphere--composition and chemistry
DE: 0368 Troposphere--constituent transport and chemistry
DE: 0370 Volcanic effects (8409)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting