Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This application builds on ""the old"" to create ""the new"". In 1991, an instrument of my conception called ""The Wind Imaging Interferometer"" (WINDII), was launched on NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite, a field-widened phase-stepping Michelson interferometer. It was built in Canadian industry, in collaboration with France. Funding was from the Canadian Space Agency with the scientific analysis supported by NSERC. Its objective was to measure winds and airglow emission rates of the atmosphere between 85 and 300 km above the Earth's surface. WINDII had a mass of 45 kg, on a 7000 kg satellite, whose size made possible exceptional performance. WINDII operated until 2003, obtaining unique results from some 23 million images of the upper atmosphere, producing 149 refereed publications of which the applicant was the lead author on 28 and co-author on 74. Most recent were by Dhadly et al. (2017,a,b) on winds in the polar atmosphere incorporating ground-based and satellite results in which the WINDII data provided winds not accessible to any other instrument. WINDII has provided new knowledge of the dynamics of the upper atmosphere, through the study of its constituents, and its migrating and non-migrating tides about which little was known before WINDII, and further contributions are to come. In December, 2017, a NASA instrument called MIGHTI will be launched that will provide the first results comparable to WINDII, some 26 years later, revealing the atmospheric changes over that time. * Following the success of WINDII, other approaches were considered for future Canadian missions. One supported by the CSA was adding Spatial Heterodyne Spectroscopy (SHS) to the WINDII approach. With this, the phase stepping is accomplished with no moving components and with all phase elements observed simultaneously rather than sequentially. The first version of this was for the measurement of water vapour in the atmosphere and this was flown on a high-altitude balloon and has just been flown on the NASA ER-2 aircraft. * As a result we were approached by Dr. Martin Kaufmann of the Juelich Institute of Energy and Climate Reseach in Germany in 2015 for a collaboration on upper atmospheric temperature, including atomic oxygen concentration, and an SHS instrument was jointly designed with their funding. Called AtmoSHINE, it was built in Germany but with no flight opportunity. Through York University contacts with the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre space was found on a Chinese satellite and launch is planned for June, 2018. *Thus the proposed work will combine ""the new"" with ""the old"" in conducting the following program. *1. Continued analysis of WINDII results, extending the current knowledge for the benefit of Canadians.*2. Analysis of AtmoSHINE results on large scale waves in temperature and atomic oxygen concentrations.*3. Comparison of WINDII results with those from MIGHTI, taken 26 years later, to assess atmospheric change.