Noise Reduction in a Sequence of Limb Emission Spectra by Fourier Filtering of Spectral Radiance Profiles

A sequence of atmospheric spectra measured in limb sounding mode is often evaluated by using the onion peeling method. A major disadvantage of onion peeling is that instabilities are caused by error propagation. Resulting profiles of minor constituents of the atmosphere show typical zigzag features. By appropriate preprocessing of measured noisy data, the applicability of the onion-peeling-method can be improved.