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A new type of remote sensing instrument based upon the Fabry-Perot interferometric technique has been
developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Fabry-Perot interferometry (FPI) is a well known,
powerful spectroscopic technique and one of its many applications is to be used to measure greenhouse gases
and also some harmful species in the atmosphere. With this technique, absorption of particular species is
measured and related to its concentration. A solid Fabry-Perot etalon is used as a frequency filter to restrict the
measurement to particular absorption bands of the gas of interest. With adjusting the thickness of the etalon that
separation (in frequency) of the transmitted fringes can be made equal to the almost constant separation of the
gas absorption lines. By adjusting the temperature of the etalon, which changes the index of refraction of its
material, the transmission fringes can be brought into nearly exact correspondence with absorption lines of the
particular species. With this alignment between absorption lines and fringes, changes in the amount of a species
in the atmosphere strongly affect the amount of light transmitted by the etalon and can be related to gas
concentration.
The instrument that we have developed detects the absorption of various atmospheric trace gases in direct or
reflected sunlight. It can be used as ground based, airborne and satellite sensor for gases such as carbon dioxide
(1570 nm), oxygen (762 nm and 768 nm lines sensitive to changes in oxygen pressure and oxygen temperature)
and water vapor (940 nm). Our current goal is to develop an ultra precise, inexpensive, ground based device
suitable for wide deployment as a validation instrument for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite.
We show measurements for CO2 and, O2, , compare our measurements to those obtained using other types of
sensors and discuss some of the peculiarities that must be addressed in order to provide the very high quality
column detection required for solving problems about global distribution of greenhouse gases and
climatological models. The recent long term experimental data on CO2 and O2 detection in atmosphere using
Fabry-Perot technique are presented and discussed.
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