Retrieval of atmospheric O(3), HNO(3), CFC-11, and CFC-12 profiles from MIPAS-B-89 limb emission spectra.

During the night from May 17 to May 18, 1989, the first of four flights of the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding, Balloon-borne version (MIPAS-B) instrument took place from the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales balloon-launching site at Aire-sur-l'Adour (France, 44° N latitude). From approximately 33 km float altitude, stratospheric and tropospheric limb infrared emission spectra have been recorded by this novel type of fast-scanning interferometer. Although the measured spectra did not reach the expected quality and the a priori information on the corresponding viewing directions was coarse, the data were processed successfully with a retrieval algorithm specially adapted for application to noisydata. Mixingratio profiles of ozone, nitric acid, CFC-11, and CFC-12 havebeen retrieved from limb sequences of wide spectral intervals by nonlinear least-squares fitting in combination with a layer-bylayer onion-peeling approach. A rigorous error analysis has been carried out by means of Monte Carlo calculations.