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IntroductionThe Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is the first major element in NASA's Mission to Planet Earth. It is designed to make a systematic study of the stratosphere and provide new data on the mesosphere and thermosphere. The satellite was launched on 12th September 1991. The project scientist is Dr Mark Schoerberl at NASA Goddard.
The UARS payload consists of a total of 10 instruments making measurements of chemical constituents, upper atmosphere winds and exo-atmospheric energy sources:
Parameters measured by the various chemistry and dynamics instruments are shown in a Parameters Table.
The combination of orbit and instrument design provides nearly global coverage. Plots showing the latitudinal coverage and the vertical coverage of the instruments are available.
Access to DataThe Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) level 3A data set consists of daily near global (80°N - 80°S) measurements of atmospheric trace gases, temperature, aerosols and wind profiles, as well as measurements of solar UV spectra and charged particles injected into the Earth's atmosphere. Four instruments measure chemical composition. These instruments include the Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES), the Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE), the Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder (ISAMS), and the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS).
The BADC holds data and relative documentation from the UARS instruments which measure chemical composition of the atmosphere, namely:
CLAES, ISAMS, HALOE and MLS data are held at level 3A. These consist of profiles interpolated onto a standard set of vertical levels evenly spaced in pressure, and onto standard times (level 3AT) and standard latitudes (level 3AL).
Level 3A also holds the correlative analyses which were produced by the UK Met. Office as their contribution to the UARS project.
The UARS L3A file name convention is also available.
UARS PlotsThe Goddard UARS project office keeps an archive to which investigators can submit copies of interesting or useful plots. These are available by anonymous ftp from ganesh.gsfc.nasa.gov. We maintained a mirror of these plots in the BADC archives and these plots are now available under the doc directory of each UARS instrument dataset available at BADC (e.g. under haloel2/doc)
Links to Further InformationAn outline of the UARS mission is given in a number of papers, for example, Reber et al, (1993) J. Geophys. Res. 98, D6, pp. 10643-10647. There are also special issues of Geophysical Research Letters (Vol. 20, no. 12, 1993) and Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (Vol. 51, no. 20, 1994) which are both devoted to the UARS data.
The project team at NASA Goddard maintains a list of references for papers which use data from the UARS mission which is updated approximately once every 6 months. We keep a copy of the list of references at the BADC.
For more information about each instrument, you may browse their own homepage:
Who to ContactIf you have queries about these pages or about obtaining UARS data from the BADC, you should contact the BADC Support Line.
If you would like more information about UARS you should contact the UARS Project Scientist, Dr Charles Jackman, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The Deputy Project Scientist is Dr Anne Douglass.
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