The Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography Explorer (CAIRT)

The Changing-Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomogra- phy Explorer CAIRT (www.cairt.eu) is currently one of four candidate missions for the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Explorer 11 (EE11) sat- ellite. If ultimately successful in the selection pro- cess, CAIRT would be launched in the 2031-2032 timeframe. The overarching science goal of CAIRT is to reveal, resolve and unravel the complex cou- pling between circulation and composition in our middle atmosphere, and the links with regional cli- mate change (see Figure 2). CAIRT will thus pro- vide important and novel observations throughout a large depth of the Earth atmosphere, at high spatial resolution, and should therefore be of great inter- est to the SPARC community.