100 000 000 th MIPAS result archived
On Thursday, March 7, 2013, the 100 000 000 th MIPAS result was archived to our RAID system. That specific HCOOH result was processed on Sunday, August 19, at 7:35:42. Luckily, that geolocation converged in 5 iterations with a Chi2 value of 1.866 and 6.1 degrees of freedom. It is located in a rather nice place in the carribean sea ~1000 km northeast of Barbados, but unfortunately was measured at -55.3 degrees sun elevation in the dark.
It was a warm (24 degrees) and rainy April night on the 6th, at 01:50:30 UTC 2012 (21:50:30 on April,the 5th, local time) while Envisat was heading upwards to the north pole looking for better conditions. Meanwhile, a bridge over the Filyos river in the turkish province Zonguldak collapsed, a navy F-18 fighter jet crashed in Virginia, a lift fell down in the Eiffel Tower, and the Malawi president Mutharika died.
To reach this astonishing milestone, about 42 000 000 000 CPU seconds where necessary, which exhausted 5 complete computer clusters and 13.7 employees over 10 years (the last smoldering remains of the XC2 computer have just been carried over to the scrap yard). This process consumed 2.682 GWh of electric power and produced ~1 kt CO2, which is about 0.1 ppm of the annual CO2 emission of China in 2009. For this minuscule impact, up to 27 trace gases where retrieved, organized in 74 projects and 1476 subprojects with an average of 48399 geolocations per project. One of the recent resulting papers is http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/6/495/2013/.
With our current hardware, a reprise of this achievement could be completed within 405 days of uninterrupted processing. Given that machinery, the 1 000 000 000 milestone would be reached in exactly 10 years...