Symons Gold Medal lecture 2019 - A Century of Remote Measurments of the Atmosphere

SPEAKER | Dr Clive Rodgers, University of Oxford (Emeritus)

ABSTRACT | Significant remote measurement of the Earth’s atmosphere began around 100 years ago when, in 1912, Fabry and Buisson estimated that the amount of ozone was equivalent to a layer around of 5mm at standard temperature and pressure, based on the absorption of sunlight. In 1923 Lindemann and Dobson, using measurements of the altitudes of meteors, deduced that the atmosphere above the tropopause must contain a region of much higher temperature than previously thought, and hypothesised that this was due to the absorption of solar ultraviolet radiation. Subsequently Dobson developed methods for remotely measuring ozone and organised a world wide network of ozone stations.

Since satellites became available as platforms for atmospheric measurements in the 1960s, many different techniques have been developed for the remote measurement of all kinds of atmospheric properties. This lecture will trace the development of remote measurement and data analysis methods over the last century or so.

BIOGRAPHY | Dr Rodgers is an emeritus fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and reader in atmospheric physics in the Department of Physics at Oxford.
His interests have been in radiative transfer, molecular spectroscopy, the application of estimation theory to the inverse problem of radiative transfer, and the application of satellite data to stratospheric and mesospheric dynamics and chemistry.
He has been Co-Investigator on several Oxford satellite instruments from 1970 onwards, and most recently on two instruments flying on NASA's Aura satellite of the Earth Observing System, the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (Oxford and NCAR) and the Tropospheric Emission Sounder (JPL).