Abstract

Remote measurement of stratospheric ozone in the atmosphere from an earth-orbiting satellite is a relatively straight-forward procedure (Ref. ¹). However, in order to measure ozone in the atmosphere near the earth's surface, a satellite-borne instrument must be able to "see through" the stratospheric ozone layer and all the way to the ground. This paper de scribes an active laser system which uses carbon dioxide lasers and is capable of measuring tropospheric ozone distributions. The procedure for selection of the appropriate laser wavelengths is discussed. Previous work has described a method for measurement of ozone using carbon dioxide lasers (Ref. ², ³, ⁴) and for calculating altitude distributions from these measurements (Ref. ⁵). The method discussed here takes advantage of the fact that atmospheric pressure broadens the ozone absorption lines in the lower troposphere much more than the same feature in the stratospheric ozone layer. Thus, a carbon dioxide laser wavelength that is located about three Lorentz half-widths (0.25 cm^-1 or 10 GHz) away from an ozone line center will be absorbed mostly by the tropospheric ozone.

© 1983 Optical Society of America