Earth and Space Science (Jun 2022)
Exploring Altitudinal Resolution of Twilight Airglow Red Lines Using Twilight Photometer
Abstract
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, one attempt was made to observe twilight airglow red lines having wavelengths in between 6100 Å and 7100 Å 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. Our observations provides information about ionized Nitrogen (N2) emissions at 6482.05 Å, 6610.56 Å and 6482.70 Å, oxygen red emission lines of 6300 Å and 6364 Å, emission caused by formation of a molecule of nitric oxide (NO), metallic emissions of sodium four red lines between 6500 and 6700 Angstroms and lithium near 6708 Å, hydroxyl (OH) emission at 6329 Å and red sprites emissions (at altitudes 50–90 km). The principal aspiration of this study is to highlight the conspicuous capability of Semiautomatic twilight photometer to study the twilight airglow emission lines. This is the first attempt in India to obtain the twilight airglow data using Twilight photometer. 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.
Keywords
