To facilitate the production of long time series of atmospheric measurements, the biases between different instruments need to be quantified for periods of coincident measurements. Therefore, the current ACE-FTS version 3 dataset is being validated against other satellite instruments (such as Aura-MLS and HALOE) as well as the previous ACE-FTS (version 2.2 + updates) dataset, which has been well validated.

The ACE-FTS is a high resolution (0.02 cm-1) Fourier transform spectrometer which takes measurements over the 750-4400 cm-1 (2.2 to 13.3 µm) spectral region. It is one of two instruments on board the Canadian SCISAT-1 satellite which was launched on the 12 August 2003 and has now been measuring the atmosphere for over 7 years. The ACE-FTS uses solar occultation geometry to produce profiles of atmospheric temperature, pressure and more than 30 trace gas species over a latitude range of ~85oN to ~85oS.