Algorithm for Retrieval of Temperature in Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere from O2 A-Band Night Glow

The O2 A-band night glow can be used to retrieve the temperature in the range of 80–120 km in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT). From the full spectrum of A-band night glow, the band used to retrieve temperature is selected based on the sensitivity of the emission line on temperature, taking into account the compromise relationship between the spectral band and resolution, inversion efficiency, and inversion accuracy. The non-linear iterative inversion method based on optimization theory is adopted for the retrieval of temperature. Meanwhile, considering the stability of inversion, Tikhonov regularization matrix is added as a constraint, and the optimal estimation inversion algorithm is optimized to suppress the influence of measurement noise on results. Through the recovering simulated noisy spectra from an interferometer, the temperature profile with vertical resolution better than 2 km and an average accuracy better than 2 K is obtained by the optimized inversion method in this paper. In addition, the influence of a priori constraints on the inversion accuracy is studied, and a priori accuracy limits the inversion accuracy. When a priori accuracy is controlled within ±5 K, the average temperature inversion accuracy can be optimized to 1.35 K, which is better than the accuracy of OSIRIS on Odin at 90–105 km.