Abstract
Abstract. In view of the proposed geostationary satellite missions to monitor air quality from space, it is important to first assess the capability of the current suite of satellite instruments to provide information on the urban scale pollution. We explore the possibility of detecting urban signatures in the tropospheric column ozone data derived from Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)/Solar Backscattered Ultraviolet (SBUV) and Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI)/Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) satellite data. We find that distinct isolated plumes of tropospheric ozone near several large and polluted cities around the world may be detected in these data sets. The ozone plumes generally correspond with the tropospheric column NO2 plumes around these cities as observed by the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) instrument. Similar plumes are also seen in tropospheric mean ozone mixing ratio distribution after accounting for the surface and tropopause pressure variations. The total column ozone retrievals indicate fairly significant sensitivity to the lower troposphere over the polluted land areas, which might help explain these detections. These results indicate that ultraviolet (UV) measurements may, in principle, be able to capture the urban signatures and may have implications for future missions using geostationary satellites.
Highlights
The issue of urban pollution and how it affects the regional and even global environment has become increasingly important in view of the fact that nearly 50% of the world pop-ulation is predicted to be concentrated in large urban centers in the near future (Gurjar et al, 2008)
We have further examined the total ozone columns from Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) for the examples shown in Fig. 1 and found that clear signatures of the city plumes could be seen in the total ozone columns for Beijing, Sao Paulo and Mexico City and they were not affected by cloud filtering
We addressed the question of detecting possible signatures of cities in the tropospheric ozone columns for the first time as it should have important implications for future geostationary missions
Summary
The issue of urban pollution and how it affects the regional and even global environment has become increasingly important in view of the fact that nearly 50% of the world pop-. The detection of urban pollution signatures from space is linked to several factors such as the lifetime of the species, the sensitivity of the measurements to the lower troposphere and the vertical profile of the species. We use the tropospheric column ozone (TCO) database derived by Ziemke et al (2006) from the OMI and MLS instruments after cross calibrating the MLS SCO with OMI SCO obtained by the convective cloud differential method. These data have similar spatial resolution as the TOR data (1◦×1.25◦) and are available from October 2004 onwards as monthly means. The surface ozone data were obtained from the California Air Resources Board website
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