GCA-TR-69-1 1-N
RESEARCH DIRECTED TOWARD DEFINING THE VARIABILITY OF THE ATMOSPHERE BETWEEN 30 AND 200 KILOMETERS
E D Schultz
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. ... A C . 0-. G©A QA CORPORATION Bedford, Massachusetts
INTERIM REPORT CONTRACT NO NAS12-617
PREPARED FOR NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATIO "A14 ELECTRONICS RESEARCH CENTER /0 41 CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS ,
Reproduced 6ythe- September 1969 CLEARINGHOUSE l 1 for Federal Scientific & Technical Information Springfield Va 22151 GCA-TR-69-1-N
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RESEARCH DIRECTED TOWARD DEFINING THE VARIABILITY OF THE ATMOSPHERE BETWEEN 30 AND 200 KILOMETERS
E. D. Schultz
GCA CORPORATION GCA TECHNOLOGY DIVISION Bedford, Massachusetts
Interim Scientific Report
Contract No. NAS12-617
September 1969
Prepared for NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION Electronics Research Center Cambridge, Massachusetts TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section Title Page
SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION
II DATA COLLECTION
A. Soviet Meteorological Rocket Data B. Amendments to Original Data Set of 442 Soundings
III DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS
A. Processing of Original Sounding Data Set B. Other Programming Efforts
IV PLANS FOR FURTHER PROCESSING
A. Data Collection B. Further Data Processing C. Meteorological Rocket Network Data
REFERENCES
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3.l1 RESEARCH DIRECTED TOWARD DEFINING THE VARIABILITY OF THE ATMOSPHERE BETWEEN 30 AND 200 KILOMETERS
By E. D. Schultz GCA Corporation, GCA Technology Division Bedford, Massachusetts
SUMMARY
Owing to the current stringent requirements of various flight and space operations, a rather detailed knowledge of the diurnal, seasonal, and latitudinal variation in upper atmospheric properties, 30 to 200 km, is becoming increasingly important. Considerable work is required to adequately define the detailed variability of the atmosphere at these altitudes. A major accomplishment of a continuing investigation of upper atmospheric models has been the compilation of over 400 rocket and optical probe soundings performed since 1947. The present interim document reports on current work involving continued up-dating of data collection and further analysis of the data at hand. A specific dis cussion of Soviet rocket soundings, a significant percentage of the total number, is included. A computer program was written and run which reprocessed and transferred the original data collection of 442 soundings from IBM cards to magnetic tape into standard format. The program also performs monotonicity tests on the density-altitude pro files of the soundings. Additional analyses have been performed with respect to certain thermistor temperature data corrections and improve ments in the analysis of the correlation between atmospheric density and solar flux data. I. INTRODUCTION
Models of the earth's atmosphere are continually being improved on the basis of analyses of the increasing inventory of observations. These extensions have been in the number of soundings, in the number of geographical regions of the earth represented by the soundings, in the increased altitude attained by the soundings, and in the quantity and quality of the data obtained from the soundings.
Owing to the greater frequency of measurements obtained via con ventional radio-sonde techniques, the variability of the earth's atmosphere has now been rather well documented for altitudes below 30 km.
For altitudes above about 200 km there is a considerable volume of drag-acceleration data acquired from the measured orbits of arti ficial earth satellites. From these data atmospheric density can be deduced. As a result of the many satellite missions performed during the past decade, there has evolved the recognition that at these alti tudes atmospheric parameters vary significantly with respect to time of day and