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We present test data for a solid ZnSe air gapped etalon with free spectral range 3 cm-1 and finesse >70 (i.e., spectral resolution <0.043 cm-1). We present an instrument concept, the Tropopsheric Ozone Sounding (TOS) Dual Etalon Cross Tilt Order Sorting Spectrometer (DECTOSS), that would use an etalon like this to acquire nadir data at resolution <0.06 cm-1 and signal to noise the order 1000 on a range from 1036 to 1071 cm-1 in footprints with crosstrack dimension selectable (e.g., the order tens to hundreds of km), and with along track dimension the order 17 km. Instrument accommodation is the order 25 kg, 110 W and 1 mbps. We present linear error analysis for retrieval of tropospheric ozone from the data acquired by the TOS-DECTOSS. Indication is that more than 2.5 vertical layers of information on tropospheric information are retrievable. An example of the deployment of the TOS-DECTOSS would be as an instrument of opportunity (IOO) add on to the US National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). The huge advantage of the TOS-DECTOSS as compared with UV techniques for tropospheric ozone measurement is that it the can be used both day and night, the latter is not possible in the UV. The considerable advantage in signal to noise compared with a Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) for tropospheric ozone measurement, on considering that for a given footprint the DECTOSS and FTS integration times are comparable, is that the DECTOSS noise per spectral sample is dominated by statistical fluctuations of signal photons that are passed through its narrow 0.06 cm-1 bandpass, while for a similar FTS spectral sample the noise is due to fluctuations of the signal photons through the FTS bandpass of tens of cm-1. The TOS-DECTOSS signal to noise advantage on the FTS is also enhanced in that the spectral sample density of the TOS-DECTOSS data is more than one hundred times larger than for the FTS.
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