Tomographic Imaging of Airglow from Airborne Spectroscopic Measurements

A description is given of the methodology based on a single, aircraft-mounted spectroscopic imager to tomographically reconstruct airglow perturbations induced by atmospheric gravity waves. In this configuration, the imager passes under the airglow structure to gather multiple-angle views of the wave structure in a relatively short amount of time. Under the assumption that the airglow structure does not change significantly during the acquisition interval, the data can be tomographically inverted to estimate the 2D (horizontal–vertical) airglow structure. We develop an inversion strategy for this image formation task and illustrate its applicability by inverting time-sequential imaging data taken from different vantage points during the ALOHA-93 campaign to reconstruct atmospheric gravity wave structures.