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Published October 2006 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Observation of night OH in the mesosphere

Abstract

Satellite measurements from the Aura MLS instrument show a layer of OH near 82 km in the night. This layer confirms earlier measurements by ground-based LIDAR. The MLS and LIDAR observations measure OH in the lowest vibrational state and are distinct, but related chemically, from vibrationally-excited emission from the OH Meinel bands in the near infrared. The Caltech 1-D model has been extended to include vibrational dependence of OH reactions and shows good agreement with MLS OH data and with observations of the Meinel bands. The model shows a chemical lifetime of HO_x that increases from less than a day at 80 km to over a month at 87 km. Above this altitude transport processes become an important part of HO_x chemistry. The model predicts that ground state OH represents 99% of the total OH up to 84 km.

Additional Information

© 2006 The American Geophysical Union. Received 15 May 2006; Revised 14 August 2006; Accepted 30 August 2006; Published 6 October 2006. We wish to thank C. Miller and S. Sander for valuable discussions and all who helped make the Aura OH measurements possible. KKL was supported by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. YLY was supported by NASA grant NNG04GD76G to the California Institute of Technology. Research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, is performed under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Attached Files

Published - grl21867.pdf

Supplemental Material - grl21867-sup-0001-readme.txt

Supplemental Material - grl21867-sup-0002-ts01.txt

Supplemental Material - grl21867-sup-0003-ts01.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023