Massimo Carlotti, Enzo Papandrea, Marco Ridolfi
Research activities of the "Environmental Physical-Chemistry" group.
The activity of the research team is oriented toward the study of problems relating to the atmospheric environment. Investigation techniques are designed for the spectroscopy of the atmosphere with instruments operating onboard high-altitude platforms, such as satellites, stratospheric balloons and aircraft. For analysis and characterization of data acquired by atmospheric experiments, algorithms are developed that implement:
- radiative-transfer for forward model simulations,
- retrieval of the spatial distribution of geophysical parameters (temperature, pressure and concentration of atmospheric gases), with both one-dimensional (global-fit) and two-dimensional (thomography, with geo-fit) retrieval models,
- modeling of the geophysical chain with sensitivity functions,
- error calculations with variance-covariance matrices.
The research team operates within an international framework, in cooperation with universities and research institutions of Europe, U.S. and Canada. The Environmental Physical-Chemistry group has designed and contributed to the development of the analysis system adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA) for real-time analysis of data acquired by the MIPAS (Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding) experiment operating onboard the ENVISAT satellite since March 1st, 2002.
Available instrumentation:
Within the department the group has a number of computing facilities and peripherals around a kernel of three main computers that are:
- Alphaserver ES45 with 2 Alpha EV7 CPUs, Clock: 1 GHz, RAM: 5 Gb, HD: 140 Gb.
- Alphaserver 4100 with 2 Alpha EV6 CPUs, Clock: 600 MHz, RAM: 3 Gb, HD: 40Gb.
- LINUX server with 2 Pentium III Xeon CPUs. Clock: 700 MHz. RAM: 8Gb. HD: 100Gb.
All the instrumentation is devoted to internal use.