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A Global Climatology Of The Mesospheric Sodium Layerfrom Gomos Data During The 2002-2008 Period, D. F. Fussen, F. Vanhellemont, C. T'Etart, N. Mateshvili, E. Dekemper, N. Loodts, C. Bingen, E. Kyrola, J. Tamminen, V. Sofieva, A. Hauchecorne, F. Dalaudier, J. L. Bertaux, G. Barrot, L. Blanot, O. Fanton D'Andon, T. Fehr, L. Saavedra, Tao Yuan, C. Y. She

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This paper presents a climatology of the mesospheric sodium layer built from the processing of 7 years of GOMOS data. With respect to preliminary results already published for the year 2003, a more careful analysis was applied to the averaging of occultations inside the climatological bins (10° in latitude-1 month). Also, the slant path absorption lines of the Na doublet around 589 nm shows evidence of partial saturation that was responsible for an underestimation of the Na concentration in our previous results. The sodium climatology has been validated with respect to the Fort Collins lidar measurements and, to a lesser …