Abstract. The Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere (GLORIA) is an infrared imaging FTS spectrometer with a 2-D infrared detector operated on two high flying research aircrafts. It has flown on eight campaigns and measured along more than 300 000 km of flight track. This paper details our instrument calibration and characterization efforts, which in particular leverage almost exclusively in-flight data. First, we present the framework of our new calibration scheme, which uses information from all three available calibration measurements (two blackbodies and upward pointing deep space measurements). Part of this scheme is a new correction algorithm correcting the erratically changing non-linearity of a subset of detector pixels and the identification of remaining bad pixels. Using this new calibration, we derive a 1-σ bound of 1 % on the instrumental gain error and a bound of 30 nW cm−2 sr−1 cm on the instrumental offset error. We show how we can examine the noise and spectral accuracy for all measured atmospheric spectra and derive a spectral accuracy of 5 ppm, on average. All these errors are compliant with the initial instrument requirements. We also discuss, for the first time, the pointing system of the GLORIA instrument. Combining laboratory calibration efforts with the measurement of astronomical bodies during the flight, we can derive a pointing accuracy of 0.032°, which corresponds to one detector pixel. The paper concludes with a brief study on how these newly characterised instrumental parameters affect temperature and ozone retrievals. We find that, first, the pointing uncertainty and, second, the instrumental gain uncertainty introduce the largest error in the result.
Quantification and mitigation of the airborne limb imaging FTIR GLORIA instrument effects and uncertainties
