An Infrared Spectral Sequence for M Dwarfs

We present a spectral sequence from 1-2.5 um of M dwarfs from GL411 which is classified as M2V to the best brown dwarf candidate GD165B (M10V). This sequence shows the progressive importance of water vapour in the stmospheres of M dwarfs. We take the strength of the water absorption bands as the basis of a new method to derive effective temperatures. We also identify many of the stronger atomic and molecular features and find that their strengths correlate with our derived temperature scale.