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STATUS:
06.25.09
Spacecraft Status
The spacecraft has performed well over these past several weeks with the exception of bitlock. The uplink receiver bitlock has been sporadic and we were without bitlock for almost 36 days, followed by another outage of 22 days. On Jun 19 we experienced a few minutes of bitlock and during this time uploaded commands. AIM operated nominally in autonomy mode until Jun 21 when the spacecraft transitioned to operating on stored commands. Also, special command loads were sent to the spacecraft to perform CIPS Noon Flatfields.
Instrument Status
SOFIE continues to operate nominally. The northern hemisphere PMC season data continues to be processed smoothly, and the data is being promptly released to the public. This data should be of particular interest following the sudden stratospheric warming event noted earlier in the year. The next generation of processing software is being currently developed and refraction based T/P retrievals and CO2 retrievals are under study.
Reviews of the SOFIE refraction measurement and meteoric smoke papers have been received and the papers are being revised. Presentations are being prepared for the upcoming AIM science team meeting, PMC workshop, and LPMR meeting: 1) AIM CV, 2) AIM hemispheric difference objective, 3) Ice refractive index, 4) SOFIE PMC particle property retrievals, 5) SOFIE meteoric smoke results.
CIPS continues to operate nominally, and is measuring many clouds in this 2009 northern hemisphere season. We are happy to announce that season-long “summary” data files and accompanying documentation are now available on the web site. There are both Common Volume (CV) season summary files (which only contain data in the CV region, but for every CV pixel) and level 4 season summary files (which contain data at all latitudes, but binned in 5-degree latitude bins); both are described on the web site. Read codes and documentation are provided on the web site. Note that these summary files are being provided in addition to the individual level 4 orbit files. We expect that the summary files will be simpler to use and will thus allow users a more immediate glance at the data. The summary files only contained binned parameters, however, so users wishing to have more flexibility in their analyses might still wish to use the individual level 4 orbit-by-orbit files.
We are continuing to evaluate all of the CIPS data products. Also, a new set of northern hemisphere flat field images is currently being acquired; data will be re-processed with this new calibration information in July. Finally, we are testing and evaluating a new level 4 retrieval algorithm based on an optimal estimation approach; if successful, this approach will be implemented in the standard processing in July.
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