Comment on egusphere-2022-774

Abstract

The vertical distribution of ozone plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry, climate change, air pollution, and human health. Over the twenty-first century, spaceborne remote sensing methods and instrumentation have evolved to better characterise this distribution. We quantify the ability of ozone retrievals to characterise this distribution through a combination of thermal infrared (TIR) and Ultra Violet (UV) spectral radiances, harnessing co-located TIR measurements from the Cross Track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP), and UV measurements from the TROPospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), which is on the Sentinel 5-Precursor (S5P) satellite. The combination of TIR and UV measurements improves the ability of satellites to characterise global ozone profiles, over the use of each band individually. The CrIS retrievals enhanced by TROPOMI radiances in the Huggins band (325–335 nm) show good agreement with independent datasets both in the troposphere and in the stratosphere in spite of calibration issues in the TROPOMI UV. Improved performance is characterised in the stratosphere from CrIS-TROPOMI. Comparable performance between CrIS-TROPOMI and CrIS-only is found in the troposphere with degrees of freedom for signal of about 2 globally, but higher in the tropics partitioned equally between the lower and upper troposphere. These results demonstrate that CrIS/TROPOMI retrievals have the potential to substantially improve our understanding of ozone. If spectral accuracy is improved in future TROPOMI calibration, the degrees of freedom of signal in the stratosphere could double when using bands 1 and 2 of TROPOMI (270–330 nm), while tropospheric degrees of freedom of signal could increase by 25 %.