The new Hitran2000 database is available by contacting Dr. Laurence Rothman at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, or by going to the HITRAN website, www.hitran.com, and filling out the request form. It contains over 1 million absorption lines of 32 molecules in the atmosphere.

Over the past 15 years, Ontar has established a very close relationship with Dr. Laurence L. Rothman currently at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the improvements and updates of the HITRAN database, a government sponsored and world wide recognized molecular spectral lines database.

HITRAN is an acronym for high-resolution transmission molecular absorption database. This database is a compilation of spectroscopic parameters including over one million spectral lines of 38 molecules. These parameters can be used by other programs such as Fascode to predict and simulate the transmission and emission of light in the atmosphere. This database was started by the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories (AFCRL) in the late 1960s in response to the need for detailed knowledge of the infrared properties of the atmosphere. HITRAN database mainly consists of line-by-line files with each line containing transition parameters for a specific spectral line. Besides those line-by-line files, HITRAN database also contains IR cross section files, UV cross section files, Aerosol indices of refraction, other useful things such as partition sum tables.

Ontar has developed the software called JavaHAWKS, which is the Java version of the HITRAN Atmospheric Workstation. JavaHAWKS is mainly used to manipulate the HITRAN database and associated molecular spectroscopic databases. Specifically, JavaHAWKS will let you walk through HITRAN database and pull out the spectral lines the user is interested in.

The following figure illustrates the file structure of the current HITRAN database. More information about HITRAN database can be obtained from http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/HITRAN. The HITRAN database is distributed without charge through HITRAN ftp site ftp://cfa-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/HITRAN/.





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