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STATUS:
01.22.10
Spacecraft Status
Our AIM spacecraft continues to operate well. We’ve experienced several short periods of bitlock over the past few weeks. During one of these periods of bitlock, we loaded the Southern Hemisphere CIPS Flat Field calibrations. These will run January 27-30.
Instrument Status
SOFIE payload operations remain unchanged with all engineering parameters well
within tolerance.
A paper describing retrievals of mesospheric ice particle temperature and shape, and an investigation of the phase of mesospheric ice was recently submitted to JGR: Hervig, M. E., and L. L. Gordley, The temperature, shape, and phase of mesospheric ice from SOFIE observations, J. Geophys. Res., in review, 2010.
CIPS continues to operate nominally. We have been able to acquire calibration data each month of the SH 2009-2010 season; we will continue acquiring calibration data once a month in the SH through February, and then will switch to the NH.
When the SH 0910 season began, the standard processing yielded PMC frequencies that were lower than expected – by analyzing out-of-season data, it was determined that this resulted from an overly conservative definition of one of the retrieval parameters. This parameter has now been modified, and data for the SH 0910 season will be released this week (beginning Monday, 25 January). A plot of daily cloud frequencies for the SH 0910 seasons is shown here.
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