Retrieval of water vapor profile in the mesosphere from satellite ozone and hydroxyl measurements by the basic dynamic model of mesospheric photochemical system

Abstract

Abstract. We propose an indirect method for retrieving a number of significant minor gas constituents of the atmosphere. The technique is based on the use of so-called basic dynamic models of atmospheric photochemical systems simplified mathematically correctly in a special manner. It is applied to a mesospheric system describing day evolution of key minor gas constituents at these heights. We take as initial data experimental data of the CRISTA-MAHRSI satellite campaign of August 1997 during which ozone and hydroxyl (O 3 and OH) concentrations were measured simultaneously. It is demonstrated that the use of the basic dynamic model allows retrieval of vertical distribution (within the 53-85 km range of heights) of water vapor concentration that is one of the control parameters of the mesospheric photochemistry.

Nighttime Ozone Chemical Equilibrium in the Mesopause Region

“…This assumption was used to investigate hydroxyl emission mechanisms, morphology, and variability in the upper mesosphere‐lower thermosphere region (Kowalewski et al, ; Marsh et al, ; Xu et al, , ). Kulikov et al (, ) proposed algorithms for simultaneous retrieval of O, H, HO 2 , and H 2 O by joint OH and O 3 satellite measurements under the assumption of PEO. Mlynczak and Solomon (, ) and Mlynczak, Hunt, Mertens, et al () made use of this assumption to derive exothermic heating rates.…”

Retrieval of nighttime distributions of the mesosphere: lower thermosphere characteristics from SABER/TIMED data

“…In the second case, we used the values of parameters presented in the forth column of Table 2. Local daytime concentrations of OH and HO 2 were found from retrieved O and H data with the use of the chemical equilibrium conditions of OH and HO 2 (see, for example, [14,19]):…”

Several notes on the OH* layer

“…One of the subjects of investigations by airglow measurements is the trend of temperature (e.g., Espy and Stegman, 2002;Offermann et al, 2006Offermann et al, , 2010. Potentially, airglow measurements can be useful to retrieve water vapor in the mesopause (Kulikov et al, 2009) and chemical heat (Mlynczak and Solomon, 1993).…”