Probing the atmospheric precipitable water vapor with SOFIA, Part I, Measurements of the water vapor overburden with FIFI-LS

Abstract

We report on the measurements of telluric water vapor made with the instrument FIFI-LS on SOFIA. Since November 2018, FIFI-LS has measured the water vapor overburden with the same measurement setup on each science flight with about 10 data points throughout the flight. This created a large sample of 469 measurements at different locations, flight altitudes and seasons. The paper describes the measurement principle in detail and provides some trend analysis on the 3 parameters. This presents the first systematic analysis with SOFIA based on in situ observations.

15 pages, 7 figures, 1 tables, accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP)

References in corpus (1)

• GREAT/SOFIA atmospheric calibration

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