Monitoring of atmospheric composition using the thermal infrared IASI/MetOp sounder

Abstract

Abstract. Atmospheric remote sounding from satellites is an essential component of the observational strategy deployed to monitor atmospheric pollution and changing composition. The IASI nadir looking thermal infrared sounder onboard MetOp will provide 15 years of global scale observations for a series of key atmospheric species, with unprecedented spatial sampling and coverage. This paper gives an overview of the instrument's capability for measuring atmospheric composition in the perspective of chemistry and air quality. The assessment is made in terms of species, accuracy and vertical information. Global distributions are presented for CO, CH 4 , O 3 (total and tropospheric), HNO 3 , NH 3 , and volcanic SO 2 . Local distributions of organic species measured during fire events, such as C 2 H 4 , CH 3 OH, HCOOH, and PAN are also shown. For each species or process, the link is made to specialized papers in this issue.

The MUSICA MetOp/IASI H<sub>2</sub>O and δD products: characterisation and long-term comparison to NDACC/FTIR data

“…IASI is an infrared Michelson interferometer and covers the spectral range from 645 to 2762 cm −1 (3.62 to 15.5 µm). More instrument details can be found at Clerbaux et al (2009) and August et al (2012) (Rothman et al, 2009(Rothman et al, , with 2009. We also fit the surface temperature and the atmospheric temperature, whereby the a priori temperatures are the EUMETSAT level 2 temperatures.…”

Global validation of SCIAMACHY limb ozone data (versions 2.9 and 3.0, IUP Bremen) using ozonesonde measurements

“…To achieve this goal, ground-based, balloon-borne, airborne and satellite instruments have been used to monitor ozone abundances in the atmosphere during the last decades. For satellite instruments, different observation techniques including solar/stellar occultation measurements (e.g., SAGE -Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (McCormick et al, 1989); HALOE -Halogen Occultation Experiment (Russell et al, 1994); ACE -Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (McElroy et al, 2007); GOMOSGlobal Ozone Monitoring by Occultation of Stars (Bertaux et al, 2010)), limb scatter/emission measurements (e.g., MLS -Microwave Limb Sounder (Waters et al, 2006); MIPAS -Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (Fischer et al, 2008); OSIRIS -Optical Spectrograph and InfraRed Imager System (Llewellyn et al, 2004)) and nadir measurements (e.g., GOME/GOME2 -Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment Callies et al, 2000); OMI -Ozone Monitoring Instrument (Levelt et al, 2006); IASI -Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (Clerbaux et al, 2009)) are used (see, e.g., Sofieva et al, 2013;Hassler et al, 2014, and references therein). The passive imaging spectrometer used in this study, SCIA-MACHY (SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CartograpHY), provided vertical distributions of atmospheric trace gases by employing the limb-scattering measurement technique (Burrows et al, 1995;Bovensmann et al, 1999).…”

Tropical tropospheric ozone column retrieval for GOME-2

“…Tropical tropospheric ozone has been inferred from a number of instruments, including GOME (Burrows et al, 1999), SCIAMACHY (Bovensmann et al, 1999), IASI (Clerbaux et al, 2009), OMI (Levelt et al, 2006) and MLS . Several techniques have been used to retrieve tropospheric ozone columns, such as the tropospheric ozone residual (TOR) method using OMI total ozone and MLS stratospheric ozone column measurements (Ziemke et al, 2006;Schroeberl et al, 2007), the direct retrieval of tropospheric ozone (e.g.…”