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Full list of authors: Hegglin, Michaela I.; Tegtmeier, Susann; Anderson, John; Bourassa, Adam E.; Brohede, Samuel; Degenstein, Doug; Froidevaux, Lucien; Funke, Bernd; Gille, John; Kasai, Yasuko; Kyrölä, Erkki T.; Lumpe, Jerry; Murtagh, Donal; Neu, Jessica L.; Pérot, Kristell; Remsberg, Ellis E.; Rozanov, Alexei; Toohey, Matthew; Urban, Joachim; von Clarmann, Thomas; Walker, Kaley A.; Wang, Hsiang-Jui; Arosio, Carlo; Damadeo, Robert; Fuller, Ryan A.; Lingenfelser, Gretchen; McLinden, Christopher; Pendlebury, Diane; Roth, Chris; Ryan, Niall J.; Sioris, Christopher; Smith, Lesley; Weigel, Katja.-- This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; The Stratosphere-troposphere Processes and their Role in Climate (SPARC) Data Initiative (SPARC, 2017) performed the first comprehensive assessment of currently available stratospheric composition measurements obtained from an international suite of space-based limb sounders. The initiative's main objectives were (1) to assess the state of data availability, (2) to compile time series of vertically resolved, zonal monthly mean trace gas and aerosol fields, and (3) to perform a detailed intercomparison of these time series, summarizing useful information and highlighting differences among datasets. The datasets extend over the region from the upper troposphere to the lower mesosphere (300-0.1 hPa) and are provided on a common latitude-pressure grid. They cover 26 different atmospheric constituents including the stratospheric trace gases of primary interest, ozone (O3) and water vapor (H2O), major long-lived trace gases (SF6, N2O, HF, CCl3F, CCl2F2, NOy ), trace gases with intermediate lifetimes (HCl, CH4, CO, HNO3), and shorter-lived trace gases important to stratospheric chemistry including nitrogen-containing species (NO, NO2, NOx, N2O5, HNO4), halogens (BrO, ClO, ClONO2, HOCl), and other minor species (OH, HO2, CH2O, CH3CN), and aerosol. This overview of the SPARC Data Initiative introduces the updated versions of the SPARC Data Initiative time series for the extended time period 1979-2018 and provides information on the satellite instruments included in the assessment: LIMS, SAGE I/II/III, HALOE, UARS-MLS, POAM II/III, OSIRIS, SMR, MIPAS, GOMOS, SCIAMACHY, ACE-FTS, ACEMAESTRO, Aura-MLS, HIRDLS, SMILES, and OMPS-LP. It describes the Data Initiative's top-down climatological validation approach to compare stratospheric composition measurements based on zonal monthly mean fields, which provides upper bounds to relative inter-instrument biases and an assessment of how well the instruments are able to capture geophysical features of the stratosphere. An update to previously published evaluations of O3 and H2O monthly mean time series is provided. In addition, example trace gas evaluations of methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO), a set of nitrogen species (NO, NO2, and HNO3), the reactive nitrogen family (NOy ), and hydroperoxyl (HO2) are presented. The results highlight the quality, strengths and weaknesses, and representativeness of the different datasets. As a summary, the current state of our knowledge of stratospheric composition and variability is provided based on the overall consistency between the datasets. As such, the SPARC Data Initiative datasets and evaluations can serve as an atlas or reference of stratospheric composition and variability during the "golden age"of atmospheric limb sounding. The updated SPARC Data Initiative zonal monthly mean time series for each instrument are publicly available and accessible via the Zenodo data archive (Hegglin et al., 2020). © 2021 The Author(s). ; The research of Michaela I. Hegglin was supported by the CSA SSEP (grant no. 9SCIGRA-29), the ESA STSE-SPIN (contract no. 4000105291/12/I-NB), and the ESA Water Vapour Climate Change Initiative (contract no. 4000123554). The research of Susann Tegtmeier was funded by the WGL project TransBrom and the EU project SHIVA (grant no. FP7-ENV-2007-1-226224). Work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment is a Canadian-led mission mainly supported by the CSA. Development of the ACE-FTS gridded datasets was supported by grants from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences and the CSA. MIPAS data analysis and validation was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (grant no. 50EE1547) and by the ESA Ozone Climate Change Initiative. Bernd Funke acknowledges support by the Spanish MCINN (grant no. ESP2017-87143-R and PID2019-110689RB-I00) and EC FEDER funds. Development of the SCIA-MACHY and IUP-OMPS gridded datasets at the University of Bremen was funded in part by the German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Units SHARP (grant no. FOR1095) and VolImpact (grant no. FOR2820), the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) SADOS project, ESA SQWG and Ozone CCI projects, EU/ECMWF C3S project, and the University and State of Bremen. Alexei Rozanov and Carlo Arosio also acknowledge the German HLRN (High-Performance Computer Center North) and the thread-safe FOR-TRAN library GALAHAD. In addition, Carlo Arosio acknowledges the support by the PRIME program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and ESA's Living Planet Fellowship SOLVE. Work on HIRDLS was supported in the US by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and in the UK by the National Environmental Research Council (NERC). Development of the Odin/SMR gridded datasets was supported by the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA). ; With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709. ; Peer reviewed

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. ; We investigate the impact of the so-called energetic particle precipitation (EPP) indirect effect on lower stratospheric ozone, ClO, and ClONO2 in the Antarctic springtime. We use observations from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on Aura, the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment-Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS) on SCISAT, and the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) on Envisat, covering the period from 2005 to 2017. Using the geomagnetic activity index Ap as a proxy for EPP, we find consistent ozone increases with elevated EPP during years with an easterly phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) in both OMI and MLS observations. While these increases are the opposite of what has previously been reported at higher altitudes, the pattern in the MLS O3 follows the typical descent patterns of EPP-NOx . The ozone enhancements are also present in the OMI total O3 column observations. Analogous to the descent patterns found in O3, we also found consistent decreases in springtime MLS ClO following winters with elevated EPP. To verify if this is due to a previously proposed mechanism involving the conversion of ClO to the reservoir species ClONO2 in reaction with NO2, we used ClONO2 observations from ACE-FTS and MIPAS. As ClO and NO2 are both catalysts in ozone destruction, the conversion to ClONO2 would result in an ozone increase. We find a positive correlation between EPP and ClONO2 in the upper stratosphere in the early spring and in the lower stratosphere in late spring, providing the first observational evidence supporting the previously proposed mechanism relating to EPP-NOx modulating Clx-driven ozone loss. Our findings suggest that EPP has played an important role in modulating ozone depletion in the last 15 years. As chlorine loading in the polar stratosphere continues to decrease in the future, this buffering mechanism will become less effective, and catalytic ozone destruction by EPP-NOx will likely become a major contributor to Antarctic ozone loss. © Author(s) 2021 ; Emily M. Gordon was supported by a University of Otago postgraduate publishing bursary. The Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE), also known as SCISAT, is a Canadian-led mission mainly supported by the Canadian Space Agency. ; With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709. ; Peer reviewed

We present a non-local thermodynamic equilibrium retrieval scheme for atmospheric composition and its application to Mars CO2 infrared limb emissions as measured by the OMEGA instrument on board Mars Express (MEx). These emissions are caused by CO2 fluorescence of solar radiation, and thus the retrieval scheme accounts for non-LTE processes. We analyzed the dayside limb observations from a selection of three OMEGA orbits or data qubes. Before the retrieval was applied, we performed a radiometric calibration, cleaned the spectra (including clustering techniques) and generated radiance vertical profiles for each dataset. We also present information on the inversion set up, results on the retrieved CO2 density profiles, as well as the temperature profiles derived from the CO2 densities by assuming hydrostatic equilibrium. An extensive sensitivity study of the retrieval scheme was carried out, including its application to the OMEGA spectra taken at different MEx orbital configurations, to conclude on its performance and to offer recommendations for its systematic use with MEx datasets. The uncertainty due to the instrumental Gain calibration and that caused by the retrieval noise error itself are of large importance for the inversion, but a comparable component of the total error comes from the uncertainties of the temperature provided by the GCM. We demonstrated that, between 120 and 160 km, CO2 profiles can be derived with a precision around 30% and a vertical resolution of about 15 km. © 2020 ; This work was conducted as part of the project UPWARDS-633127 under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation Programme. The IAA team was supported by grant PGC2018-101836-B-100 ( MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU ) and by the Spanish MCIU through the 'Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa' award to the IAA/CSIC ( SEV-2017-0709 ). OMEGA data are publicly available via the ESA Planetary Science Archive. ; Peer reviewed

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; A new global set of atmospheric temperature profiles is retrieved from recalibrated radiance spectra recorded with the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS). Changes with respect to previous data versions include a new radiometric calibration considering the time dependency of the detector nonlinearity and a more robust frequency calibration scheme. Temperature is retrieved using a smoothing constraint, while tangent altitude pointing information is constrained using optimal estimation. ECMWF ERA-Interim is used as a priori temperature below 43 km. Above, a priori data are based on data from the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model Version 4 (WACCM4). Bias-corrected fields from specified dynamics runs, sampled at the MIPAS times and locations, are used, blended with ERA-Interim between 43 and 53 km. Horizontal variability of temperature is considered by scaling an a priori 3D temperature field in the orbit plane in a way that the horizontal structure is provided by the a priori while the vertical structure comes from the measurements. Additional microwindows with better sensitivity at higher altitudes are used. The background continuum is jointly fitted with the target parameters up to 58 km altitude. The radiance offset correction is strongly regularized towards an empirically determined vertical offset profile. In order to avoid the propagation of uncertainties of O3 and H2O a priori assumptions, the abundances of these species are retrieved jointly with temperature. The retrieval is based on HITRAN 2016 spectroscopic data, with a few amendments. Temperature-adjusted climatologies of vibrational populations of CO2 states emitting in the 15 µm region are used in the radiative transfer modeling in order to account for non-local thermodynamic equilibrium. Numerical integration in the radiative transfer model is now performed at higher accuracy. The random component of the temperature uncertainty typically varies between 0.4 and 1 K, with occasional excursions up to 1.3 K above 60 km altitude. The leading sources of the random component of the temperature error are measurement noise, gain calibration uncertainty, spectral shift, and uncertain CO2 mixing ratios. The systematic error is caused by uncertainties in spectroscopic data and line shape uncertainties. It ranges from 0.2 K at 20 km altitude for northern midlatitude summer conditions to 2.3 K at 12 km for tropical conditions. The estimated total uncertainty amounts to values between 0.6 K at 20 km for midlatitude summer conditions to 2.5 K at 12–15 km for tropical conditions. The vertical resolution varies around 3 km for altitudes below 50 km. The long-term drift encountered in the previous temperature product has been largely reduced. The consistency between high spectral resolution results from 2002 to 2004 and the reduced spectral resolution results from 2005 to 2012 has been largely improved. As expected, most pronounced temperature differences between version 8 and previous data versions are found in elevated stratopause situations. The fact that the phase of temperature waves seen by MIPAS is not locked to the wave phase found in ECMWF analyses demonstrates that our retrieval provides independent information and does not merely reproduce the prior information. © Author(s) 2021. ; This study was partly funded by DLR under contract no. 50EE1547 (SEREMISA). The IAA team was supported by MCIU under projects ESP2017-87143-R and PID2019-110689RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. WACCM simulations are based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement no. 1852977. ; With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709. ; Peer reviewed

Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; Aims: We aim at detecting water vapor in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter HD 209458 b and perform a multi-band study in the near infrared with CARMENES. Methods: The water vapor absorption lines from the atmosphere of the planet are Doppler-shifted due to the large change in its radial velocity during transit. This shift is of the order of tens of km s-1, whilst the Earth's telluric and the stellar lines can be considered quasi-static. We took advantage of this shift to remove the telluric and stellar lines using SYSREM, which performs a principal component analysis including proper error propagation. The residual spectra contain the signal from thousands of planetary molecular lines well below the noise level. We retrieve the information from those lines by cross-correlating the residual spectra with models of the atmospheric absorption of the planet. Results: We find a cross-correlation signal with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 6.4, revealing H2O in HD 209458 b. We obtain a net blueshift of the signal of -5.2 -1.3+2.6 km s-1 that, despite the large error bars, is a firm indication of day- to night-side winds at the terminator of this hot Jupiter. Additionally, we performed a multi-band study for the detection of H2O individually from the three near infrared bands covered by CARMENES. We detect H2O from its 0.96-1.06 ¿m band with a S/N of 5.8, and also find hints of a detection from the 1.06-1.26 ¿m band, with a low S/N of 2.8. No clear planetary signal is found from the 1.26-1.62 ¿m band. Conclusions: Our significant H2O signal at 0.96-1.06 ¿m in HD 209458 b represents the first detection of H2O from this band individually, the bluest one to date. The unfavorable observational conditions might be the reason for the inconclusive detection from the stronger 1.15 and 1.4 ¿m bands. H2O is detected from the 0.96-1.06 ¿m band in HD 209458 b, but hardly in HD 189733 b, which supports a stronger aerosol extinction in the latter, in line with previous studies. Future data gathered at more stable conditions and with larger S/N at both optical and near-infrared wavelengths could help to characterize the presence of aerosols in HD 209458 b and other planets.© A. Sánchez-López et al. 2019 ; CARMENES is funded by the German Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), the European Union through European Regional Fund (FEDER/ERF), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the German Science Foundation (DFG), and the Junta de Andalucia, with additional contributions by the members of the CARMENES Consortium (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Landessternwarte Konigstuhl, Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai, Institut fur Astrophysik Gottingen, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Thuringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Hamburger Sternwarte, Centro de Astrobiologia, and the Observatorio de Calar Alto). Financial support was also provided by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid, the Spanish Ministerios de Ciencia e Innovacion and of Economia y Competitividad, the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER/ERF), the Agencia estatal de investigacion, and the Fondo Social Europeo under grants AYA2011-30 147-C03-01, -02, and -03, AYA2012-39612-C03-01, ESP2013-48391-C4-1-R, ESP2014-54062-R, ESP 2016-76076-R, ESP2016-80435-C2-2-R, ESP2017-87143-R, BES-2015-073500, and BES-2015-074542. IAA authors acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the >Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa> award SEV-2017-0709. L.T.-O. acknowledges support from the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 848/16). Based on observations collected at the Observatorio de Calar Alto. We thank the anonymous referee for their insightful comments, which contributed to improve the quality of the manuscript.

NOMAD is a suite of three spectrometers that will be launched in 2016 as part of the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission. The instrument contains three channels that cover the IR and UV spectral ranges and can perform solar occultation, nadir and limb observations, to detect and map a wide variety of Martian atmospheric gases and trace species. Part I of this work described the models of the UVIS channel; in this second part, we present the optical models representing the two IR channels, SO (Solar Occultation) and LNO (Limb, Nadir and Occultation), and use them to determine signal to noise ratios (SNRs) for many expected observational cases. In solar occultation mode, both the SO and LNO channel exhibit very high SNRs >5000. SNRs of around 100 were found for the LNO channel in nadir mode, depending on the atmospheric conditions, Martian surface properties, and observation geometry. ; NOMAD has been made possible thanks to funding by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and financial and contractual coordination by the ESA Prodex Office. The research was performed as part of the "Interuniversity Attraction Poles" programme financed by the Belgian government (Planet TOPERS). UK funding is acknowledged under the UK Space Agency grant ST/I003061/1. ; Peer Reviewed

A publisher correction to this article was published on 17 April 2019 ; Global dust storms on Mars are rare1,2 but can affect the Martian atmosphere for several months. They can cause changes in atmospheric dynamics and inflation of the atmosphere3, primarily owing to solar heating of the dust3. In turn, changes in atmospheric dynamics can affect the distribution of atmospheric water vapour, with potential implications for the atmospheric photochemistry and climate on Mars4. Recent observations of the water vapour abundance in the Martian atmosphere during dust storm conditions revealed a high-altitude increase in atmospheric water vapour that was more pronounced at high northern latitudes5,6, as well as a decrease in the water column at low latitudes7,8. Here we present concurrent, high-resolution measurements of dust, water and semiheavy water (HDO) at the onset of a global dust storm, obtained by the NOMAD and ACS instruments onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. We report the vertical distribution of the HDO/H2O ratio (D/H) from the planetary boundary layer up to an altitude of 80 kilometres. Our findings suggest that before the onset of the dust storm, HDO abundances were reduced to levels below detectability at altitudes above 40 kilometres. This decrease in HDO coincided with the presence of water-ice clouds. During the storm, an increase in the abundance of H2O and HDO was observed at altitudes between 40 and 80 kilometres. We propose that these increased abundances may be the result of warmer temperatures during the dust storm causing stronger atmospheric circulation and preventing ice cloud formation, which may confine water vapour to lower altitudes through gravitational fall and subsequent sublimation of ice crystals3. The observed changes in H2O and HDO abundance occurred within a few days during the development of the dust storm, suggesting a fast impact of dust storms on the Martian atmosphere. © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. ; This project acknowledges funding by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), with financial and contractual coordination by the ESA Prodex Office (PEA 4000103401, 4000121493); by the Spanish MICINN through its Plan Nacional and by European funds under grants ESP2015-65064-C2-1-P and ESP2017-87143-R (MINECO/FEDER); by the UK Space Agency through grants ST/R005761/1, ST/P001262/1, ST/R001405/1, ST/S00145X/1, ST/R001367/1, ST/P001572/1 and ST/R001502/1; and the Italian Space Agency through grant 2018-2-HH.0. The IAA/CSIC team acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the 'Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa' award for the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (SEV-2017-0709). This work was supported by the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS under grant number 30442502 (ET_HOME). The ACS experiment is led by IKI, Space Research Institute in Moscow, assisted by LATMOS in France. The project acknowledges funding by Roscosmos and CNES. The science operations of ACS are funded by Roscosmos and ESA. IKI affiliates acknowledge funding under grant number 14.W03.31.0017 and contract number 0120.0 602993 (0028-2014-0004) of the Russian government. ; Peer Reviewed

A publisher correction to this article was published on 17 April 2019 ; The detection of methane on Mars has been interpreted as indicating that geochemical or biotic activities could persist on Mars today1. A number of different measurements of methane show evidence of transient, locally elevated methane concentrations and seasonal variations in background methane concentrations2–5. These measurements, however, are difficult to reconcile with our current understanding of the chemistry and physics of the Martian atmosphere6,7, which—given methane's lifetime of several centuries—predicts an even, well mixed distribution of methane1,6,8. Here we report highly sensitive measurements of the atmosphere of Mars in an attempt to detect methane, using the ACS and NOMAD instruments onboard the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter from April to August 2018. We did not detect any methane over a range of latitudes in both hemispheres, obtaining an upper limit for methane of about 0.05 parts per billion by volume, which is 10 to 100 times lower than previously reported positive detections2,4. We suggest that reconciliation between the present findings and the background methane concentrations found in the Gale crater4 would require an unknown process that can rapidly remove or sequester methane from the lower atmosphere before it spreads globally. © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. ; ExoMars is the space mission of ESA and Roscosmos. The ACS experiment is led by IKI, the Space Research Institute in Moscow, assisted by LATMOS in France. The project acknowledges funding by Roscosmos and CNES. The science operations of ACS are funded by Roscosmos and ESA. IKI affiliates acknowledge funding under grant number 14.W03.31.0017 and contract number 0120.0 602993 (0028-2014-0004) of the Russian government. The NOMAD experiment is led by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), assisted by co-PI teams from Spain (IAA-CSIC), Italy (INAF-IAPS), and the UK (Open University). This project acknowledges funding by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), with the financial and contractual coordination of the ESA Prodex Office (PEA 4000103401 and PEA 4000121493), by Spanish MICINN through its Plan Nacional and by European funds under grants ESP2015-65064-C2-1-P and ESP2017-87143-R (MINECO/FEDER), as well as by the UK Space Agency through grants ST/R005761/1, ST/P001262/1, ST/R001405/1, ST/S00145X/1, ST/R001367/1, ST/P001572/1 and ST/R001502/1, and the Italian Space Agency through grant 2018-2-HH.0. This work was supported by the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS under grant number 30442502 (ET_HOME). ; Peer Reviewed

NOMAD (Nadir and Occultation for MArs Discovery) is one of the four instruments on board the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, scheduled for launch in March 2016. It consists of a suite of three high-resolution spectrometers - SO (Solar Occultation), LNO (Limb, Nadir and Occultation) and UVIS (Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer). Based upon the characteristics of the channels and the values of Signal-to-Noise Ratio obtained from radiometric models discussed in (Vandaele et al., 2015a, 2015b; Thomas et al., 2016), the expected performances of the instrument in terms of sensitivity to detection have been investigated. The analysis led to the determination of detection limits for 18 molecules, namely CO, HO, HDO, CH, CH, CH, HCO, CH, SO, HS, HCl, HCN, HO, NH, NO, NO, OCS, O. NOMAD should have the ability to measure methane concentrations Inter-university Attraction Poles> programme financed by the Belgian Government (Planet TOPERS no P7-15) and a BRAIN Research Grant BR/143/A2/SCOOP. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement no. 607177 CrossDrive. UK funding is acknowledged under the UK Space Agency Grant ST/I003061/1. ; Peer Reviewed