Technology
The term "sounder" in AIRS's name refers to the fact that the instrument measures temperature and water vapor as a function of height.
AIRS measures the infrared brightness coming up from Earth's surface and from the atmosphere. Its scan mirror rotates around an axis along the line of flight and directs infrared energy from the Earth into the instrument. As the spacecraft moves along, this mirror sweeps the ground creating a scan swath that extends roughly 800 kilometers on either side of the ground track. Within the instrument, an advanced, high-resolution spectrometer separates the infrared energy into wavelengths.
Each infrared wavelength is sensitive to temperature and water vapor over a range of heights in the atmosphere, from the surface up into the stratosphere. By having multiple infrared detectors, each sensing a particular wavelength, a temperature profile, or sounding of the atmosphere, can be made. While prior space instruments had only 15 detectors, AIRS has 2378. This greatly improves the accuracy, making it comparable to measurements made by weather balloons.
Thick clouds act like a wall to the infrared energy measured by AIRS. However, microwave instruments on board Aqua can see through the clouds with limited accuracy. Using a special computer algorithm, data from AIRS and the microwave instruments are combined to provide highly accurate measurements in all cloud conditions resulting in a daily global snapshot of the state of the atmosphere.
Read more about this topic: Atmospheric Infrared Sounder
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)