Limb sounding technique is an important tool for remote observations of Earth’s middle atmosphere.It aimed at an altitude of about 10—100 km.Compared with the nadir viewing
limb sounding has a higher vertical resolution.Recently
sub-millimeter(0.1—1.0 mm or 300 GHz—3 THz) limb sounding technique has been developed
which can detect the halogen elements a ssociated with the O 3 processes
a special significance for atmospheric environmental monitoring of the ozone layer.This study o verviews five limb sounders(Odin/SMR
EOS AURA/MLS
JEM/SMILES
MASTER and SOPRANO) and their reversion s ystems.Sub-millimeter limb sounding from space has several advantages.The sounders always have higher spectral resolutions and broader bandwidth.Furthermore
many trace gases have spectral emissions in sub-millimeter ranges.Sub-millimeter limb sounding can provide many species of Cl y and Br y with higher precision.The uncertainty of the retrieval profiles of ClO and HCl can be less than 10%.All the reversion systems of the five sub-millimeter limb sounders are based on the OEM(Optimal Estimation Method) with Gauss-Newton or Levenberg-Marquardt iterative.Since the sub-millimeter limb sounding can reach troposphere
the forward model has to consider the multi-scattering by clouds.