OBSERVATIONS OF THE INFRARED SOLAR SPECTRUM FROM SPACE BY THE ATMOS EXPERIMENT

The final flight of the Atmospheric Trace Molecule Spectroscopy experi ment as part of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Scienc e (ATLAS-3) Space Shuttle mission in 1994 provided a new opportunity t o measure broadband (625-4800 cm(-1), 2.1-16 mu m) infrared solar spec tra at an unapodized resolution of 0.01 cm(-1) from space. The majorit y of the observations were obtained as exoatmospheric, near Sun center , absorption spectra, which were later ratioed to grazing atmospheric measurements to compute the atmospheric transmission of the Earth's at mosphere and analyzed for vertical profiles of minor and trace gases. Relative to the SPACELAB-3 mission that produced 4800 high Sun spectra (which were averaged into four grand average spectral, the ATLAS-3 mi ssion produced some 40,000 high Sun spectra (which have been similarly averaged) with an improvement in signal-to-noise ratio of a factor of 3-4 in the spectral region between 1000 and 4800 cm(-1). A brief desc ription of the spectral calibration and spectral quality is given as w ell as the location of electronic archives of these spectra. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America