Benefits and Challenges of Eleven Years of AIRS Observations

The NASA Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) satellite instrument has provided near-continuous infrared spectral observations of the Earth since September 2002. AIRS data have been assimilated into weather forecasts since launch, and have been the basis of hundreds of scientific analyses. However, the AIRS record has not been fully utilized, primarily because of its size, global coverage, and detail: it now includes over 10 billion spectra (at 2,000 resolved frequencies), and over 1 billion retrieved scenes (at 45 km horizontal resolution). This talk will describe some of the potential benefits of the AIRS data set, including drought monitoring, air quality assessment, constraints on climate model physics, and trend analyses.