A procedure for the extraction of airglow features in the presence of strong background radiation

Ground-based measurements of terrestrial airglow are useful for many applications in aeronomy. However, in the past observations have been limited to times and circumstances when the relatively weak airglow features are not overwhelmed by bright sky background emission due mainly to Rayleigh scattering of sunlight. In this paper the authors report a procedure which can be used to automatically extract weak airglow emissions in the presence of strong background radiation. The computer code developed for this purpose is user friendly and provides, in addition to retrieved airglow intensities, quantitative diagnostics which include estimates of error of measurement. The procedure is designed to allow rapid bulk processing of data which has not been possible previously