Current and Future Applications of Atmospheric Infrared Sounder Data

The NASA Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) satellite instrument has been providing near-continuous infrared spectral observation of the Earth since September 2002. The resulting data have been used for a variety of applications. Most notable has been weather forecasting: AIRS has provided the greatest forecast improvement of any single space-based instrument over the last 10 years. Other applications of the AIRS data include the testing of weather and climate model physics, and the monitoring of air pollution and volcanic plumes. Despite these successes, only a small portion of the AIRS data set has been used for applications. Current forecast methodologies exclude the large fraction of cloudy information, and information about several atmospheric constituents has not been exploited. Model testing is usually done with data sets limited in space and time. Several future paths for applications of AIRS observations will be described.