2003 Noble Lecture Series @ Atmospheric Physics

This years lecture series will be given by Professor Clive Rodgers of the University of Oxford

Prof. Rodgers is the world's foremost expert on inverse theories for atmospheric sounding. His book entitled "Inverse Methods for Atmospheric Sounding" is the definitive book on retrieval methods. Prof. Rodgers will be coming as a Noble Lecturer, supported by the endowment funds from the Noble Trust.

Apart from formal lectures, a Public Lecture will be given at the University of Toronto on Tuesday at 3pm entitled Sounding the Atmosphere with MIPAS and there will be opportunities for graduate students and others for informal discussions with Prof. Rodgers during the week

A talk will also be given at the Meteorological Services of Canada, Dufferin Road, Toronto, at a time TBD.

Provisional program

Public lecture: Sounding the atmosphere with MIPAS

MIPAS is the first of a new generation of atmospheric remote sounding instruments, flying on ESA's Envisat satellite. It is a high spectral resolution Michelson Fourier Transform Interferometer, measuring thermal emission from polyatomic atmospheric gases, including most of those which are important for understanding the chemistry of the stratosphere and the upper troposphere. Understanding of the chemistry of ozone and related molecules is beginning to improve but there is still much to be done, particularly in the critical lower stratosphere and the upper troposphere. In this seminar I will describe the background and motivation for making this kind of measurement, how the instrument operates, and how the distributions of atmospheric temperature and constituents are derived from the measured spectra.It is still early days in the data analysis. The initial validation of the products has been carried out, and some data will soon be available to the public. Some early results will be presented.

For more details on this year's Nobel lectures please contact Dr. Jay Kar on 416 971 2363