Pressure sensing of the atmosphere by solar occultation using broadband CO(2) absorption

A technique for obtaining pressure at the tangent point in an IR solar occultation experiment is described. By measuring IR absorption in bands of atmospheric CO(2) (e.g., 2.0 microm, 2.7 microm, or 4.3 microm), mean pressure values for each tangent point layer (vertical thickness 2 km or less) of the atmosphere can be obtained with rms errors of less than 3%. The simultaneous retrieval of pressure and gas concentration in a remote-sensing experiment will increase the accuracy of inverted gas concentrations and minimize the dependence of the experiment on pressure or mass path error resulting from use of climatological pressure data, satellite ephemeris, and instrument pointing accuracy.