Technical note: Bimodality in mesospheric OH rotational population distributions and implications for temperature measurements

Kalogerakis, Konstantinos S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2629-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2629-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Layered phenomena in the mesopause region (ACP/AMT inter-journal...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2629-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

Technical note

|

28 Feb 2019

Technical note |

| 28 Feb 2019

Technical note: Bimodality in mesospheric OH rotational population distributions and implications for temperature measurements

Konstantinos S. Kalogerakis

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Feb 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Dec 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'acp-2018-1047,K.S.Kalogerakis', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Dec 2018
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Konstantinos Kalogerakis, 12 Jan 2019
- AC3: 'Manuscript Rev1', Konstantinos Kalogerakis, 12 Jan 2019
RC2: 'Review of the Manuscript', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Jan 2019
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', Konstantinos Kalogerakis, 12 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Konstantinos Kalogerakis on behalf of the Authors (05 Feb 2019) Author's response

ED: Publish as is (12 Feb 2019) by Franz-Josef Lübken

AR by Konstantinos Kalogerakis on behalf of the Authors (15 Feb 2019)

Short summary

Light emission from energetic hydroxyl radical, OH*, is a prominent feature in spectra of the night sky. It is routinely used to determine the temperature of the atmosphere near 90 km. This note shows that the common practice of using only a few emission features from low rotational excitation to determine rotational temperatures does not account for the bimodality of the OH population distributions and can lead to large systematic errors.