Improvement of GOME-2 Tropospheric Ozone Profile Retrievals from Joint UV/Visible Measurements

Abstract:

It has been shown that adding visible measurements in the Chappuis band to UV measurements in the Hartley/Huggins bands can significantly enhance retrieval sensitivity to lower tropospheric ozone from backscattered solar radiances due to deeper photon penetration in the visible to the surface than in the ultraviolet. The first NASA EVI TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument is being developed to measure backscattered solar radiation in two channels (~290-490 and 540-740 nm) and make atmospheric pollution measurements over North America from the Geostationary orbit. However, this retrieval enhancement has yet to be solidly demonstrated from existing measurements due to the weak ozone absorption in the visible and strong interference from surface reflectance and the requirement of accurate radiometric calibration across different spectral channels.

We present GOME-2 retrievals from joint UV/visible measurements using the SAO optimal estimation based ozone profile retrieval algorithm, to directly explore the retrieval improvement in lower tropospheric ozone from additional visible measurements. To reduce the retrieval interference from surface reflectance, we add characterization of surface spectral reflectance in the visible based on ASTER and other surface reflectance spectra and MODIS BRDF climatology into the ozone profile algorithm using two approaches: fitting several EOFs (Empirical Orthogonal Functions) and scaling reflectance spectra. We also perform empirical radiometric calibration of the GOME-2 data based on radiative transfer simulations. We evaluate the retrieval improvement of joint UV/visible retrieval over the UV retrieval. These results clearly show the potential of using the visible to improve lower tropospheric ozone retrieval.