Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmsa31a1608h&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SA31A-1608
Other
0310 Airglow And Aurora, 0340 Middle Atmosphere: Composition And Chemistry
Scientific paper
The Chapman mechanism (1939) offers the accepted chemical pathway for the production of excited states of mesospheric sodium, leading to nightglow at two wavelengths: D2 (589.158 nm) and D1 (589.756 nm). While the Chapman mechanism leaves open the possibility that the intensity ratio of the two transitions may vary due to the chemical reaction involving atomic oxygen, early observations by Sipler and Biondi (1978) yielded the value of two within experimental error. Recent work by Slanger et al. (2005), however, showed that not only does the intensity ratio vary, but its value is related to the concentration ratio of atomic oxygen [O] to molecular oxygen [O2]. They proposed a modification of the Chapman mechanism involving two competing chemical pathways for sodium production to account for the observed variation. This paper will describe our compact, Faraday filter-based spectrometer to measure the D2/D1 intensity ratio of the sodium nightglow from the upper mesosphere. The novelty of this method also permits determination of the fractional contributions of the two chemical pathways to test the validity of the modified Chapman mechanism for Na chemistry, as well as to infer information about [O]/[O2]. Since the delineation between the two chemical pathways requires a spectral resolution of 0.0002 nm, this is not possible with any other existing instrument. With this spectrometer deployed at the Colorado State University sodium lidar facility (41°N, 105°W), we expect to be able to measure short-term variations of the sodium nightglow intensity ratio and the chemical pathway fraction, from which [O]/[O2] can be inferred. These observations may yield new insights into mesospheric chemistry, especially for atomic and molecular oxygen, which play a key role in upper atmospheric chemistry and dynamics.
Harrell Sean D.
Krueger David A.
Reising Steven C.
She Canlin
Yuan Tengkai
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