Vertical Water Vapor Distribution In The Atmospheres Of Uranus And Neptune As Obtained From Herschel Observations
Résumé
As part of the guaranteed time key programme "Water and related chemistry in the Solar System" (KP-GT HssO) about twenty different rotational water vapor transitions have been observed in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune with the PACS instrument of the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. In addition the 110-101 ground-state transition of H2O at 557 GHz has been observed in both planets at the very high resolution of 1 MHz using the Herschel/HIFI instrument. Using a line-by-line radiation transfer model in combination with the Optimal Estimation Method as retrieval technique we analyze the data in terms of information content to derive the vertical distribution of water vapor. The resulting distribution, which is obtained from a simultaneous fit of the whole set of transitions, will be presented for both planets.