Hiroo Hayashi

Inter-University upper Atmosphere Global Observation Network (IUGONET)

An overview of the Inter-university Upper atmosphere Global Observation NETwork (IUGONET) project is presented with a brief description of the products to be developed. This is a Japanese inter-university research program to build the metadata database for ground-based observations of the upper atmosphere. The project also develops the software to analyze the observational data provided by various universities/institutes. These products will be of great help to researchers in efficiently finding, obtaining, and utilizing various data dispersed across the universities/institutes. This is expected to contribute significantly to the promotion of interdisciplinary research, leading to more a comprehensive understanding of the upper atmosphere.

Current status of level 2 product of Superconducting Submillimeter-Wave Limb-Emission Sounder (SMILES)

New level 2 products v2.0 of JEM/SMILES are scheduled to be released in Sep., 2011. This will be the first publicreleased version. In pre-released product v1.3, positive bias of retrieved temperature in the stratosphere was the largest issue since temperature is basic parameter which characterizes the atmospheric structure. The new product use latest L1B 007 which includes gain nonlinearity effect of receivers, bias of temperature in upper stratosphere is suppressed. In addition, we stopped temperature retrieval above 40km and refer MLS temperature product with applying migrating tidal model. HCl profiles in mesosphere become constant, which supports this temperature processing.

The Digital Database of Long-Term Solar Chromospheric Variation

From 1926 to 1969, a long term solar full disk observation was done by Kyoto University. Daily, Ca II K (393.4 nm) spectroheliographic images and white light images were recorded on photographic plates. In this report, we will give the current status of our project to digitize all these images and to construct a database of these images for public use through the IUGONET system. In addition, we will discuss our perspective on the scientific analysis of the database by taking the solar CaII K brightness as a proxy measure of the solar UV irradiance on the terrestrial upper atmosphere.

Sub-MM limb observation of stratosphere and mesosphere using ISS/JEM/SMILES

Performance of Superconducting Submillimeter-Wave Limb Emission Sounder (SMILES) onboard International Space Station was discussed from the analysis of random errors of Chlorine monoxide (ClO) in the stratosphere and mesosphere. Some lessons learned from the SMILES operation in space are discussed.

Earthquake damaged area estimation using DMSP/OLS night-time imagery-application for Hanshin-Awaji earthquake

After the Marmara earthquake disaster in Turkey (Aug.1999), Kohiyama et al. proposed a method to estimate the impacted area of the earthquake using visible and near-infrared (VNIR) satellite imagery provided by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Programs Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS), and succeeded in estimating the impacted area of the Marmara earthquake disaster and the Ji-ji earthquake disaster in Taiwan (Sep. 1999) based on their method. They assumed that the brightness of the area would decrease if the buildings collapsed or blackout occurred due to the earthquake. Then, those areas whose brightness decreased significantly after the earthquake compared with before the earthquake were estimated as the impacted area. The purpose of the present study is to check the validity of the above mentioned method by the application for the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (05:46 Jan. 17, 1995) in which the more detailed and various types of damage data due to the earthquake are available as compared with the verification in Turkey.