Radiometric calibration of second-generation Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)

The improved TOMS instruments, flight models 3, 4, and 5, are to be flown aboard Earth probe (EP), Japanese ADEOS, and Russian Meteor-3M satellites, respectively. TOMS obtains the total column amount of the atmospheric ozone from measurements of the extra-terrestrial solar spectral irradiance and the backscattered earth spectral radiance at six ultraviolet wavelengths between 308.6 nm and 360 nm. The added scientific goal of new generation instruments is to monitor the trend of the global burden of the atmospheric ozone, which requires an accuracy of 1% in the calibration for the ratio of the radiance to the irradiance measurements. The emphasis of the prelaunch-calibration approaches was to maximize the accuracy in the ratio of the calibration for the two measurement modes and to minimize possibility of the systematic errors. The source geometry was maintained as close as possible in the calibration setup for the two measurement modes so that the uncertainty associated with the source could be canceled out in the ratio of the two calibrations. Also, multiple calibration techniques and radiometric sources have been used to check consistency of the calibration. The FM-3 calibration results show a three sigma standard errors of the mean for the ratio calibration that range from 0.28% to 0.63% in descending order of the wavelength.