Tropospheric vertical distribution of tropical Atlantic ozone observed by TES during the northern African biomass burning season

Abstract

[1] We present vertical distributions of ozone from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) over the tropical Atlantic Ocean during January 2005. Between 10N and 20S, TES ozone retrievals have Degrees of Freedom for signal (DOF) around 0.7 -0.8 each for tropospheric altitudes above and below 500 hPa. As a result, TES is able to capture for the first time from space a distribution characterized by two maxima: one in the lower troposphere north of the ITCZ and one in the middle and upper troposphere south of the ITCZ. We focus our analysis on the north tropical Atlantic Ocean, where most of previous satellite observations showed discrepancies with in-situ ozone observations and models. Trajectory analyses and a sensitivity study using the GEOS-Chem model confirm the influence of northern Africa biomass burning on the elevated ozone mixing ratios observed by TES over this region.

The influence of boreal biomass burning emissions on the distribution of tropospheric ozone over North America and the North Atlantic during 2010

“…We use TES global survey level 2 data version 4 (V004), geographical coverage of these data during the summer of 2010 did not extend poleward of 50 • N. TES V004 ozone profile retrievals were validated against ozonesondes during the spring and summer phases of ARCTAS and found to be biased high in the troposphere by up to 15 % (Boxe et al, 2010), comparable to the 3-10 ppbv bias reported for the V002 retrievals at northern mid-latitudes (Nassar et al, 2008). TES ozone profile retrievals have been used in a number of studies evaluating biomass burning outflow in the boreal regions over Siberia (Verma et al, 2009) and North America (Alvarado et al, 2010;Boxe et al, 2010), and outflow from African biomass burning over the Atlantic Ocean (Jourdain et al, 2007) and Indonesia . Ozone profiles retrieved from the TES data, for cloud-free conditions over the North Atlantic, are typically characterized by the averaging kernels shown in the left-hand plot of Fig.…”

Seasonal stratospheric intrusion of ozone in the upper troposphere over India

“…TES provides a global view of tropospheric trace gas profiles including ozone, water vapor, and carbon monoxide, along with atmospheric temperature, surface temperature and emissivity, effective cloud top pressure, and effective cloud optical depth (Worden et al, 2004). For cloud free conditions, the vertical resolution of TES ozone profile retrievals is typically 6 km in the tropics (Jourdain et al, 2007;Worden et al, 2004). TES measurements are available since 2005.…”

The zonal structure of tropical O<sub>3</sub> and CO as observed by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer in November 2004 – Part 2: Impact of surface emissions on O<sub>3</sub> and its precursors

“…In particular, the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), aboard NASA's Aura spacecraft, adds a unique observational dataset that includes vertical estimates of both ozone and a key signature of pollution, carbon monoxide. Co-located measurements of ozone and CO can help distinguish between natural and anthropogenic sources of ozone (Zhang et al, 2006) and vertical profile information can aid in disentangling the meteorological processes driving the redistribution of ozone (Jourdain et al, 2007).This information will be crucial to unraveling the impact of surface emissions on free tropospheric ozone.…”