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Special issue on planetary atmospheres
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer 109 (2008) 881 www.elsevier.com/locate/jqsrt
Preface
Special issue on planetary atmospheres This special issue was conceived during a series of sessions on the spectroscopy and radiative transfer of planetary atmospheres that has been held annually since 2006 at the spring European Geosciences Union General Assembly. The purpose of these sessions was to provide to the scientists working in the fields of spectroscopy, retrieval, and radiative-transfer modeling, as applied to planetary atmospheres, a forum to further enhance their mutual interests. Recent advances and interest in the knowledge of planetary atmospheres have expanded and are expected to significantly increase in the future, especially with the challenging prospect of investigating extra-solar planets. Through this issue, we have endeavored to cover experimental and theoretical works on spectroscopy and radiative transfer as they relate to the characterization of planetary atmospheres. This is the first time that the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer has devoted an entire issue to this hot topic. We are certainly not the first; a recent special issue of Comptes Rendus Physique (volume 6, number 8, 2005) was devoted to spectroscopy and planetary atmospheres. The papers in this special issue of JQSRT were solicited from the spectroscopy and radiative-transfer communities at large. They represent new and novel efforts. They were reviewed by the same standards as regular-issue papers. The first half of the special issue presents papers on various aspects of molecular spectroscopy that improve the ability to make atmospheric retrievals. We ordered them, roughly, from simple to more complex spectra. These papers are followed by articles on experimental techniques and spectroscopic database issues. The final papers describe approaches in radiative-transfer modeling that can be brought to bear when studying planetary atmospheres. While many of the methodologies described by the papers in this issue equally apply to our own planet, we believe that with the advances in observational and theoretical techniques we are on the threshold of great discoveries within and beyond our solar system. We anticipate that more research articles of this nature will be appearing in the literature.
Laurence S. Rothman Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics Division, MS50, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138-1516, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
F. Javier Martin-Torres AS&M, Inc. NASA/Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA
Jean-Marie Flaud CNRS and Universities of Paris 12 and 7, LISA, France 0022-4073/$ - see front matter r 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2008.02.002
Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer 109 (2008) 881 www.elsevier.com/locate/jqsrt
Preface
Special issue on planetary atmospheres This special issue was conceived during a series of sessions on the spectroscopy and radiative transfer of planetary atmospheres that has been held annually since 2006 at the spring European Geosciences Union General Assembly. The purpose of these sessions was to provide to the scientists working in the fields of spectroscopy, retrieval, and radiative-transfer modeling, as applied to planetary atmospheres, a forum to further enhance their mutual interests. Recent advances and interest in the knowledge of planetary atmospheres have expanded and are expected to significantly increase in the future, especially with the challenging prospect of investigating extra-solar planets. Through this issue, we have endeavored to cover experimental and theoretical works on spectroscopy and radiative transfer as they relate to the characterization of planetary atmospheres. This is the first time that the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer has devoted an entire issue to this hot topic. We are certainly not the first; a recent special issue of Comptes Rendus Physique (volume 6, number 8, 2005) was devoted to spectroscopy and planetary atmospheres. The papers in this special issue of JQSRT were solicited from the spectroscopy and radiative-transfer communities at large. They represent new and novel efforts. They were reviewed by the same standards as regular-issue papers. The first half of the special issue presents papers on various aspects of molecular spectroscopy that improve the ability to make atmospheric retrievals. We ordered them, roughly, from simple to more complex spectra. These papers are followed by articles on experimental techniques and spectroscopic database issues. The final papers describe approaches in radiative-transfer modeling that can be brought to bear when studying planetary atmospheres. While many of the methodologies described by the papers in this issue equally apply to our own planet, we believe that with the advances in observational and theoretical techniques we are on the threshold of great discoveries within and beyond our solar system. We anticipate that more research articles of this nature will be appearing in the literature.
Laurence S. Rothman Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics Division, MS50, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138-1516, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
F. Javier Martin-Torres AS&M, Inc. NASA/Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA
Jean-Marie Flaud CNRS and Universities of Paris 12 and 7, LISA, France 0022-4073/$ - see front matter r 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2008.02.002