“…Aircraft and ground-based measurements available from the Tropospheric Airborne Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TAFTS) (Canas et al, 1997) have been used to probe water vapour spectroscopy, upper tropospheric humidity, the radiative properties of cirrus and snow-ice surface emissivity (Green et al, 2012;Fox et al, 2015;Cox et al, 2007Cox et al, , 2010Bellisario et al, 2017). Balloon and ground-based observations from the Radiation Explorer in the Far InfraRed -Prototype of Applications and Development (REFIR-PAD; Bianchini et al, 2006) have been exploited to determine precipitable water (Bianchini et al, 2011), investigate the spectral signature of cirrus (Maestri et al, 2014) and provide simultaneous retrievals of water vapour, temperature and cirrus properties (Di Natale et al, 2017). The Far-InfraRed Spectroscopy of the Troposphere (FIRST) instrument (Mlynczak et al, 2006) has participated in both balloon and ground-based campaigns, providing a rigorous test of the ability of radiative transfer models to match the spectroscopic signals measured in the far infrared (Mlynczak et al, 2016;Mast et al, 2017).…”