OZONE IN THE MIDDLE ATMOSPHERE AS MEASURED BY THE IMPROVED STRATOSPHERIC AND MESOSPHERIC SOUNDER

The improved stratospheric and mesospheric sounder (ISAMS) made ozone measurements in the stratosphere and mesosphere, with dense coverage o ver a broad range of latitudes, on about 180 days between September 19 91 and July 1992. In this paper we are concerned with version 10 of th e ISAMS data, which is recommended for use in the pressure range 10-0. 1 mbar at night and 10-1 mbar during daytime. We describe the measurem ents and the retrieval algorithm, present an error analysis, and provi de comparisons of the results to both climatological and coincident da ta. It is demonstrated that biases with respect to other well-validate d data sets are less than 10%, which is well within the internal asses sment of systemetic errors.