Mapping carbon monoxide pollution from space down to city scales with daily global coverage

Matthäus Kiel ,Haili Hu ,Tobias Borsdorff ,Wolfgang Stremme ,Jochen Groß ,Frank Hase ,G. C. Toon ,Coleen M. Roehl ,Martine De Mazière ,Sabrina G. Arnold ,Michel Grütter ,Dietrich G. Feist ,Otto Hasekamp ,Markus Rettinger ,Mat­thias Schneider ,P. O. Wennberg ,Joost Aan De Brugh ,David F. Pollard ,Omaira García ,Jochen Landgraf ,Ralf Sussmann ,Mahesh Kumar Sha

doi:10.5194/amt-11-5507-2018

Abstract

Abstract. On 13 October 2017, the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite with the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) as its single payload. TROPOMI is the first of ESA's atmospheric composition Sentinel missions, which will provide complete long-term records of atmospheric trace gases for the coming 30 years as a contribution to the European Union's Earth Observing program Copernicus. One of TROPOMI's primary products is atmospheric carbon monoxide (CO). It is observed with daily global coverage and a high spatial resolution of 7×7 km2. The moderate atmospheric resistance time and the low background concentration leads to localized pollution hotspots of CO and allows the tracking of the atmospheric transport of pollution on regional to global scales. In this contribution, we demonstrate the groundbreaking performance of the TROPOMI CO product, sensing CO enhancements above cities and industrial areas and tracking, with daily coverage, the atmospheric transport of pollution from biomass burning regions. The CO data product is validated with two months of Fourier-transform spectroscopy (FTS) measurements at nine ground-based stations operated by the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). We found a good agreement between both datasets with a mean bias of 6 ppb (average of individual station biases) for both clear-sky and cloudy TROPOMI CO retrievals. Together with the corresponding standard deviation of the individual station biases of 3.8 ppb for clear-sky and 4.0 ppb for cloudy sky, it indicates that the CO data product is already well within the mission requirement.

Highlights

The Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite was successfully launched on 13 October 2017, from Plesetsk in northern Russia with the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard
The quality of the TROPOMI carbon monoxide (CO) data product needs to be validated with independent reference observations both for clear-sky and cloudy TROPOMI measurements
Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) is a network of ground-based Fourier-transform spectrometers to measure total column concentrations of atmospheric trace gases including CO with high accuracy and precision, e.g., for satellite validation

Summary

Introduction

The Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite was successfully launched on 13 October 2017, from Plesetsk in northern Russia with the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard. The instrument is a grating spectrometer which measures sunlight reflected by the Earth’s atmosphere and its surface from the ultraviolet to the shortwave infrared (SWIR) with daily global coverage, a spatial resolu-. We use the Shortwave Infrared CO Retrieval Algorithm (SICOR) It is developed by SRON (the Netherlands Institute for Space Research), for the operational processing of TROPOMI data (Landgraf et al, 2016a, b) and serves as algorithm baseline for the data processing of the successor mission Sentinel 5. 3 presents our analysis of the TROPOMI CO data product comprising a first validation with TCCON ground-based measurements, the detection of CO hotspots and the transport of CO pollution over the oceans.

Dataset and methodology

Validation with TCCON ground-based measurements

Detection of CO hotspots

Monitoring pollution transport

Conclusions