Airglow studies using observations made with the GLO instrument on the Space Shuttle

Our understanding of Earth's upper atmosphere has advanced tremendously over the last few decades due to our enhanced capacity for making remote observations from space.;The terrestrial nighttime airglow, or nightglow, is barely discernible to the naked eye as viewed from Earth's surface. However, it is clearly visible from space - as most astronauts have been amazed to report. The nightglow consists of emissions of ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared radiation from electronically excited oxygen molecules and atoms and vibrationally excited OH molecules. It mostly emanates from a 10 km thick layer located about 100 km above Earth's surface. Various photochemical models have been proposed to explain the production of the emitting species.;In this study some unique observations of Earth's nightglow made with the GLO instrument on NASA's Space Shuttle, are analyzed to assess the proposed excitation models.;Previous analyses of these observations by Broadfoot and Gardner (2001), performed using a 1-D inversion technique, have indicated significant spatial structures and have raised serious questions about the proposed nightglow excitation models. However, the observation of such strong spatial structures calls into serious question the appropriateness of the adopted 1-D inversion technique and, therefore, the validity of the conclusions.;Space based observations of Earth's daytime and nighttime airglow emissions are very good examples of such enhancements to our knowledge.;In this study a more rigorous 2-D tomographic inversion technique is developed and applied to the available GLO data to determine if some of the apparent discrepancies can be explained by the limitations of the previously applied 1-D inversion approach.;The results of this study still reveal some potentially serious inadequacies in the proposed photochemical models. However, alternative explanations for the discrepancies between the GLO observations and the model expectations are suggested. These include upper atmospheric tidal effects and possible errors in the pointing of the GLO instrument.