摘要

The heart of atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS) instrument is a cooled array grating spectrometer operating over the range of 3.7 - 15.4 mu m. The assembly consists of 17 arrays. Within these 17 detector arrays, there are 2378 individual detectors. Spatial centroid offsets, or imperfect alignments(spatial co-misregistration), of these 17 arrays, indicate large discontinuities between most of both the longwave and shortwave arrays. We demonstrate that the co-misregistration error of AIRS might significantly handicap the optimal utilities of the AIRS data in cloud-clearing radiances for sounding retrieval and other future utilizations such as data assimilation.