Exploring altitudinal resolution of Twilight airglow red lines using
Twilight Photometer
Abstract
Twilight Photometer observations were carried out at low latitude
station Kolhapur (16039’42.2” N,
74014’20.8” E) India, during the period 1 January
2009 to 31 December 2011 to yield a reasonable qualitative picture of
the day-to-day variability of the vertical distribution of the
atmospheric aerosols from about 6 km to a maximum of 350 km. In this
study an attempt was made to observe twilight airglow red lines using
the vertical profiles of aerosols. The rate of change of red light due
to the twilight airglow shows narrow peaks with ~
600-1000% rise in intensity than due to aerosol twilight glow. The
principal aspiration of this study is to highlight the conspicuous
capability of Semiautomatic twilight photometer to study the twilight
airglow emission lines. Twilight Photometer, although currently seldom
used, is still a very effective and the most appropriate ground based
passive remote sensing tool for long-term monitoring of different
atmospheric components in a wide range of altitude for day-to-day basis.
It is an efficient system having a simple and inexpensive underlying
principle of operations, yet exhibits extremely accurate and precise
usage and can be operated by even a person of average skill. However, it
can be seen that the resultant data was consistent with nearest peer
technologies, such as LIDARs, Balloon-Borne instruments, rocket
measurements, satellite observations etc. It is the first attempt in
India to obtain the twilight airglow data using Twilight photometer.