Comparison of Methane Data Products from the TES and AIRS Infrared Sounders

Abstract:

Methane is the second most powerful greenhouse gas with a highly positive radiative forcing of 0.48 W/m² (IPCC 2013). Global concentrations of methane have been steadily increasing since 2007 (Bruhwiler 2014), raising concerns about methane’s impact on the future global climate. For about the last decade, the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) on the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura spacecraft has been detecting several trace gas species in the troposphere including methane. The goal of this study is to compare TES methane retrievals to that of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the EOS Aqua spacecraft so that scientific investigations may be transferred from TES to AIRS. The two instruments fly in the afternoon constellation (A-Train), providing numerous coincident measurements for comparison. In addition, they also have a similar spectral range, (3.3 to 15.4 µm) for TES (Beer, 2006) and (3.7 to 15.4 µm) for AIRS (Chahine, 2006), making both instruments sensitive to the mid and upper troposphere. This makes them ideal candidates to compare methane data products. However, because AIRS spectral resolution is lower than that of the TES, there may be a difference in vertical sensitivity. In addition, the retrieval techniques and error characteristics are different for the two data sets. The current state of validation for these data products will be presented. To identify conditions in which the data sets agree and dis agree, we present global maps of methane concentrations from monthly level 3 (L3) data products. We also investigate the temporal stability between the two datasets by comparing global zonal averages derived from L3 over the last decade. Finally, we compare L2 retrieval profiles from representative granules in the tropical, mid-latitude and northern latitudes.