MOPITT: 12 years of planning and 2.5 years of operations

It has been nearly 15 years since the MOPITT program began. In that time the MOPITT team and the scientific community have developed a new instrument, new retrieval algorithms, and new models to utilise the data. The increase in our understanding over that time has been profound and the MOPITT data now being produced are set to further increase that knowledge as we incorporate the data into our current models and as we strive to understand how the troposphere transports minor constituents. In this talk I will give an overview of the background to the MOPITT project from inception to the present day. I will show how our knowledge has steadily increased, and how we arrived at our current understanding. In the context of a brief overview of the present position, I will show some examples of how the MOPITT data confirm (or deny) our current understanding of tropospheric transport and also what needs to be done in the near-term to make the maximum use of the MOPITT data.