| Summary: | MIPAS has been making measurements of atmospheric infrared emission spectra since July 2002, giving a global dataset spanning almost 5 years -potentially long enough to start making assessments of any trends in stratospheric temperature and composition. However, any analysis is complicated by the fact that MI-PAS operated until March 2004 with a spectral sampling of 0.025 cm -1 then, after a lengthy interruption, resumed operations in January 2005 sampling at 0.0625 cm-1. The nominal scan pattern was also changed: from 17 spectra per limb scan for the high resolution to 27 spectra per limb scan for the reduced resolution. ESA-processed L2 data for the reduced resolution have only recently started to become available, so for this study retrievals for 15 selected days throughout the mission have been performed using the Oxford retrieval algorithm MORSE. With such a limited dataset, and significant inter-annual variability, it is not possible to conclude unambiguously whether the results show evidence of either a bias between the two modes of MIPAS operation or evidence of an atmospheric trend.
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