Quality and Availability of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Measurements from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory -2 (OCO-2)

Abstract:

OCO-2, designed to make global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, was successfully launched on July 2, 2014 and entered into the afternoon constellation of Earth observing satellites (the “A” train). Early operations and data analyses have focused on confirming the instrument characterization for essential calibration parameters to allow distribution of the observed radiances (L1B data products).

Each day, the observatory has been collecting nearly one million individual soundings over slightly more than 14 orbits. A sounding selection process identifies 6% to be routinely processed through the retrieval stage that satisfy both the best in quality (in terms of minimum bias or retrieval uncertainty) but maintains global coverage. The pre-screening process will be described, and its impact on estimates of the column averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction (X_CO2) from, nadir, glint, and target observations will be examined for the products to be made publicly available in February 2015. We will describe the project timeline for the coming year and data distribution for L2 and user-specified gridded L3 products.