Abstract. Monitoring atmospheric anthropogenic halocarbons plays an important role in tracking their atmospheric concentrations in accordance with international agreements on emissions of ozone-depleting substances and, thus, in estimating the ozone layer recovery. Within the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), regular Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) measurements can provide information on the abundancies of halocarbons on a global scale. We improved retrieval strategies for deriving the CFC-11 (CCl3F), CFC-12 (CCl2F2), and HCFC-22 (CHClF2) atmospheric columns from IR solar radiation spectra measured by the Bruker IFS125HR spectrometer at the St. Petersburg site (Russia). We used the Tikhonov–Phillips regularization approach for solving the inverse problem with optimized values of regularization parameters. We tested the strategies developed by comparison of the FTIR measurements with independent data. The analysis of the time series of column-averaged dry air mole fractions (Xgas) measured in 2009–2019 gives mean values of 225 pptv (parts per trillion by volume; CFC-11), 493 pptv (CFC-12), and 238 pptv (HCFC-22). Trend values total −0.40 % yr−1 (CFC-11), −0.49 % yr−1 (CFC-12), and 2.12 % yr−1 (HCFC-22). We compared the means, trends, and seasonal variability in XCFC-11, XCFC-12, and XHCFC-22 to that of (1) near-ground volume mixing ratios (VMRs), measured at the observational site Mace Head, Ireland (GVMR), (2) the mean in the 8–12 km layer VMRs, measured by ACE-FTS and averaged over 55–65∘ N latitudes (SVMR), and (3) Xgas values of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) for the St. Petersburg site (WXgas). In general, the comparison of Xgas with the independent data showed a good agreement of their means within the systematic errors of the measurements considered. The trends observed over the St. Petersburg site demonstrate the smaller decrease rates for XCFC-11 and XCFC-12 than that of the independent data and the same increase rate for XHCFC-22. As a whole, Xgas, SVMR, and WXgas showed qualitatively similar seasonal variations, while the GVMR variability is significantly less, and only the WXHCFC-22 variations are essentially smaller than that of XHCFC-22 and SVMRHCFC-22.

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Abstract. The cross-comparison of different techniques for atmospheric integrated water vapour (IWV) measurements is the essential part of their quality assessment protocol. We inter-compare the synchronised data sets of IWV values measured by the Bruker 125 HR Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR), RPG-HATPRO microwave radiometer (MW), and Novatel ProPak-V3 global navigation satellite system receiver (GPS) at the St. Petersburg site between August 2014 and October 2016. As the result of accurate spatial and temporal matching of different IWV measurements, all three techniques agree well with each other except for small IWV values. We show that GPS and MW data quality depends on the atmospheric conditions; in dry atmosphere (IWV smaller than 6 mm), these techniques are less reliable at the St. Petersburg site than the FTIR method. We evaluate the upper bound of statistical measurement errors for clear-sky conditions as 0.29 ± 0.02 mm (1.6 ± 0.3 %), 0.55 ± 0.02 mm (4.7 ± 0.4 %), and 0.76 ± 0.04 mm (6.3 ± 0.8 %) for FTIR, GPS, and MW methods, respectively. We propose the use of FTIR as a reference method under clear-sky conditions since it is reliable on all scales of IWV variability.

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