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

Creators: Borsdorff, Tobias; aan de Brugh, Joost; Hu, Haili; Hasekamp, Otto; Sussmann, Ralf; Rettinger, Markus; Hase, Frank; Gross, Jochen; Schneider, Matthias; Garcia, Omaira; Stremme, Wolfgang; Grutter, Michel; Feist, Dietrich G.; Arnold, Sabrina G.; De Mazière, Martine; Kumar Sha, Mahesh; Pollard, David F.; Kiel, Matthäus; Roehl, Coleen; Wennberg, Paul O.; Toon, Geoffrey C.; Landgraf, Jochen

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.

Additional Information

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Received: 20 Apr 2018 – Discussion started: 15 May 2018 – Revised: 11 Sep 2018 – Accepted: 26 Sep 2018 – Published: 09 Oct 2018. We would like to thank the team that created the TROPOMI instrument, consisting of the partnership between Airbus Defense and Space, KNMI, SRON and TNO, and commissioned by the Netherlands Space Office (NSO) and the European Space Agency (ESA). In particular, we acknowledge Ilse Aben and Ruud Hoogeveen, the SRON L1 team. Sentinel-5 Precursor is part of the EU Copernicus program. Sentinel-5 Precursor is an ESA mission on behalf of the European Commission (EC). The TROPOMI payload is a joint development by ESA and the NSO. The Sentinel-5 Precursor ground-segment development has been funded by ESA and with national contributions from the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The TCCON site at Réunion Island is operated by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy with financial support in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 under the EU project ICOS-Inwire, the ministerial decree for ICOS (FR/35/IC2), and local activities supported by LACy/UMR8105 – Université de La Réunion. The Belgian co-authors are also supported by the PRODEX TROVA project. The measurements in Mexico City were made by the projects CONACYT (nos. 275239 and 239618) and UNAM-DGAPA-PAPIIT (nos. IN112216 and IN111418). Alfredo Rodrigez, Miguel Angle Robles, Delibes Flores Roman, Wilfrido Gutiérrez, and Alejandro Bezanilla are acknowledged for technical support. This research has been funded in part by the TROPOMI national program from the NSO. The TROPOMI data processing was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative. The operation of the Ascension Island TCCON site was funded by the Max Planck Society. Data availability. The TROPOMI CO data set of this study is available for download at https://www.sron.nl/data (SRON, 2018). TCCON data are available from the TCCON Data Archive, hosted by CaltechDATA, California Institute of Technology, CA (US), https://tccondata.org/ (TCCONnetwork, 2018). The TROPOMI CO data are available via the Copernicus Open Access Hub https://s5phub.copernicus.eu. Author contributions. TB, JadB, HH, and OH did the TROPOMI CO retrieval and data analysis. RS, MR, FH, JG, MS, OG, WS, MG, DGF, SGA, MDM, MKS, DFP, MK, CR, POW, and GCT performed FTS measurements and retrievals for the various stations. JL supervised the study. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Edited by: Helen Worden. Reviewed by: two anonymous referees.

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