RemoTeC XCO2 retrievals from GOSAT to study CO2 uptake over Australia

Otto Peter Hasekamp, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, 3584, Netherlands, Rob Detmers, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, Netherlands, Haili Hu, SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, Netherlands, Jochen Landgraf, Netherlands Institute for Space Research SRON, Earth Science, Leiden, Netherlands, Sander Houweling, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Ilse Aben, SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Leiden, Netherlands and Andre Butz, German Aerospace Center, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling, Germany
Abstract:
The RemoTeC algorithm is dedicated to the accurate retrieval of the column average dry air mole fractions of carbon dioxide (XCO2) and methane (XCH4) from solar backscatter measurements in the shortwave infrared spectral range such as conducted by GOSAT and in the future OCO-2 and the Sentinel-5 Precursor. RemoTeC simultaneously retrieves XCO2 and XCH4 together with scattering properties of the atmosphere in order to take into account lightpath modification due to particle scattering. In this presentation we report on our latest (version 3.2.6) XCO2 retrievals from GOSAT, processed till the end of 2013 . We discuss improvements of our new results with respect to previous RemoTeC related to refinement of our inversion scheme, and a new topography database. We employ the retrieved GOSAT XCO2 to study CO2 uptake over Australia, in particular for the 2011 CO2 ‘drop’. We correlate the GOSAT XCO2 signals with water level information from the GRACE mission and GFED Biomass Burning emissions, and compare to transport model results optimized with surface flasks.
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