Abstract. The three Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 instruments will provide unique and long data sets for atmospheric research and applications. The complete time period will be 2007-2022, including the period of ozone depletion as well as the beginning of ozone layer recovery. Besides ozone chemistry, the GOME-2 (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2) products are important e.g. for air quality studies, climate modelling, policy monitoring and hazard warnings. The heritage for GOME-2 is in the ERS/GOME and Envisat/SCIAMACHY instruments. The current Level 2 (L2) data cover a wide range of products such as ozone and minor trace gas columns (NO 2 , BrO, HCHO, H 2 O, SO 2 ), vertical ozone profiles in high and low spatial resolution, absorbing aerosol indices, surface Lambertian-equivalent reflectivity database, clear-sky and cloud-corrected UV indices and surface UV fields with different weightings and photolysis rates. The Satellite Application Facility on Ozone and Atmospheric Chemistry Monitoring (O3M SAF) processes and disseminates data 24/7. Data quality is guaranteed by the detailed review processes for the algorithms, validation of the products as well as by a continuous quality monitoring of the products and processing. This paper provides an overview of the O3M SAF project background, current status and future plans for the utilisation of the GOME-2 data. An important focus is the provision of summaries of the GOME-2 products including product principles and validation examples together with sample images. Furthermore, this paper collects references to the detailed product algorithm and validation papers.

The European Space Agency's Ozone Climate Change Initiative (O3‐CCI) project aims at producing and validating a number of high‐quality ozone data products generated from different satellite sensors. For total ozone, the O3‐CCI approach consists of minimizing sources of bias and systematic uncertainties by applying a common retrieval algorithm to all level 1 data sets, in order to enhance the consistency between the level 2 data sets from individual sensors. Here we present the evaluation of the total ozone products from the European sensors Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME)/ERS‐2, SCIAMACHY/Envisat, and GOME‐2/MetOp‐A produced with the GOME‐type Direct FITting (GODFIT) algorithm v3. Measurements from the three sensors span more than 16 years, from 1996 to 2012. In this work, we present the latest O3‐CCI total ozone validation results using as reference ground‐based measurements from Brewer and Dobson spectrophotometers archived at the World Ozone and UV Data Centre of the World Meteorological Organization as well as from UV‐visible differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS)/Système D′Analyse par Observations Zénithales (SAOZ) instruments from the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change. In particular, we investigate possible dependencies in these new GODFIT v3 total ozone data sets with respect to latitude, season, solar zenith angle, and different cloud parameters, using the most adequate type of ground‐based instrument. We show that these three O3‐CCI total ozone data products behave very similarly and are less sensitive to instrumental degradation, mainly as a result of the new reflectance soft‐calibration scheme. The mean bias to the ground‐based observations is found to be within the 1 ± 1% level for all three sensors while the near‐zero decadal stability of the total ozone columns (TOCs) provided by the three European instruments falls well within the 1–3% requirement of the European Space Agency's Ozone Climate Change Initiative project.

Abstract. We present global upper tropospheric HCN and C 2 H 6 amounts derived from MIPAS/ENVISAT limb emission spectra. HCN and C 2 H 6 are retrieved in the spectral regions 715.5-782.7 cm −1 and 811.5-835.7 cm −1

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Review of the existing bibliography shows that the direction and magnitude of the long-term trends of UV irradiance, and their main drivers, vary significantly throughout Europe. Analysis of total ozone and spectral UV data recorded at four European stations during 1996–2017 reveals that long-term changes in UV are mainly driven by changes in aerosols, cloudiness, and surface albedo, while changes in total ozone play a less significant role. The variability of UV irradiance is large throughout Italy due to the complex topography and large latitudinal extension of the country. Analysis of the spectral UV records of the urban site of Rome, and the alpine site of Aosta reveals that differences between the two sites follow the annual cycle of the differences in cloudiness and surface albedo. Comparisons between the noon UV index measured at the ground at the same stations and the corresponding estimates from the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) forecast model and the ozone monitoring instrument (OMI)/Aura observations reveal differences of up to 6 units between individual measurements, which are likely due to the different spatial resolution of the different datasets, and average differences of 0.5–1 unit, possibly related to the use of climatological surface albedo and aerosol optical properties in the retrieval algorithms.