About the University of Toronto Team
We, the Instrument Operations Team (IOT), at University of Toronto are in charge of the MOPITT instrument flight operations. We perform annual calibration and decontamination of the instrument and monitor the instrument's health on a daily basis. At University of Toronto, we have an Instrument Support Terminal (IST) dedicated to interface with NASA were we can observe all the engineering telemetry from the instrument. This telemetry includes temperatures, pressures, voltages and currents of all the components of the instrument.
During the decontamination process we upload certain commands to the instrument which heats the instrument and causes out-gassing of contaminants from optics and detectors. This process is done annually to improve the noise levels and biases on the scientific data.
Below are short summaries and biographies of the University of Toronto team.
James Drummond
MOPITT-Canada Principal Investigator
Prof. James R. Drummond, M.A., D.Phil. FRSC graduated from the University of Oxford in England, was a faculty member of the Department of Physics, Toronto University for 27 years and then a Canada Research Chair in Remote Sounding of Atmospheres in the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University until his recent “retirement”. He is currently the Principal Investigator for the Measurements Of Pollution in The Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument on the Terra satellite; a Co-Investigator for the instruments on the Canadian SciSat satellite; Principal Investigator of the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Eureka, Nunavut; the founding president of the Canadian Network of Northern Research Operators (CNNRO); the Chair of the Forum of Arctic Research Operators (FARO); and the Canadian representative to several international organisations.
Jiansheng (Jason) Zou
MOPITT-Canada Instrument Operations
Dr. Jiansheng (Jason) Zou (M.S., Ph.D.) has worked at the University of Toronto since 1999. He has been extensively involved with Canadian spaceflight missions pre- and post-launch activities with both MOPITT and the MAESTRO. He was responsible for spacecraft instrument operations and Level 0 to Level 2 data analysis. For the MOPITT instrument operations team at UofT, he is primarily responsible for running the processing programs for the MOPITT instrument. He has contributed to several scientific publications and is the author or co-author on several refereed journal articles. Dr. Zou received his PhD in Oceanic Remote Sensing from Hamburg, Germany in 1992.
Paul Jeffery
MOPITT-Canada Instrument Operations
Dr. Paul Jeffery (Ph.D., P.Phys.) is the newly appointed MOPITT operator. He did his Ph.D. in atmospheric physics at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. His thesis work, titled "Water Vapour and Ozone: Measuring Key Trace Gases in Challenging Regions," focused on developing retrieval schemes for ground-based FTIR instruments employed in the Canadian high Arctic, on analysis of trace gas data in the UTLS, and on analysis of mesospheric water vapour. For the MOPITT instrument operations team at UofT, he is in charge of producing daily engineering data plots to monitor the health of the instrument and is involved in producing reports and scientific papers related to MOPITT.