Ozone in the middle atmosphere as measured by the improved stratospheric and mesospheric sounder

Abstract

The improved stratospheric and mesospheric sounder (ISAMS) made ozone measurements in the stratosphere and mesosphere, with dense coverage over a broad range of latitudes, on about 180 days between September 1991 and July 1992. In this paper we are concerned with version 10 of the ISAMS data, which is recommended for use in the pressure range 10–0.1 mbar at night and 10–1 mbar during daytime. We describe the measurements and the retrieval algorithm, present an error analysis, and provide comparisons of the results to both climatological and coincident data. It is demonstrated that biases with respect to other well‐validated data sets are less than 10%, which is well within the internal assessment of systematic errors.