Submillimeter measurements of isotopes of nitric acid

Abstract

The ground and low-lying vibrational states of nitric acid are observable with current instrumentation in the Earth's thermal submillimeter atmospheric emission. Remote sensing continues to improve to higher sensitivity and future missions will allow these measurements with minimal integration time. Sensing of weaker spectral features will require signal averaging, and choices of spectral windows for these features will require knowledge of the higher vibrational states and rare isotopes of the strongly emitting species. Nearly comprehensive information on vibrational states and isotopically substituted species is now available from wide bandwidth scans of natural and isotopically enriched nitric acid. In this work, ground state rotational spectra of five isotopically substituted species of nitric acid are analyzed in the submillimeter spectral range. We present the Hamiltonian parameters necessary for prediction and identification of isotopic features across the nitric acid ground state rotational spectrum. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.