Publication Date:
2017-03-27
Description:
The primary instrument on the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) is the Thermal And Near infrared Sensor for carbon Observations (TANSO) Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS). TANSO-FTS uses three short-wave infrared (SWIR) bands to retrieve total columns of CO2 and CH4 along its optical line-of-sight, and one thermal infrared (TIR) channel to retrieve vertical profiles of CO2 and CH4 volume mixing ratios (VMRs) in the troposphere. We examine version 1 of the TANSO-FTS TIR CH4 product by comparing co-located CH4 VMR vertical profiles from two other remote sensing FTS systems: the Canadian Space Agency's Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment-FTS (ACE-FTS) on SCISAT (version 3.5), and the European Space Agency's Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) on Envisat (ESA ML2PP version 6 and IMK-IAA reduced-resolution version V5R_CH4_224/225), as well as 16 ground stations with the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC). This work follows an initial inter-comparison study over the Arctic, which incorporated a ground-based FTS at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Eureka, Canada, and focuses on tropospheric and lower-stratospheric measurements made at middle and tropical latitudes between 2009 to 2013 (mid 2012 for MIPAS). For comparison, vertical profiles from all instruments are interpolated onto a common pressure grid, and the ACE-FTS, MIPAS, and NDACC vertical profiles are smoothed using the TANSO-FTS averaging kernels. We present zonally-averaged mean CH4 differences between each instrument and TANSO-FTS with and without smoothing, examine their information content, sensitive altitude range, correlation, a priori dependence, and the variability within each data set. Partial columns are calculated from the VMR vertical profiles, and their correlations are examined. We find that the TANSO-FTS vertical profiles agree with the ACE-FTS and both MIPAS retrievals' vertical profiles within 4 % below 15 km when smoothing is applied to the profiles from instruments with finer vertical resolution, but that the relative differences can increase to on the order of 25 % when no smoothing is applied. Computed partial columns are tightly correlated for each pair of data sets. We investigated whether the difference between TANSO-FTS and other CH4 VMR data products varies with latitude. Our study reveals a small dependence of around 0.1 % per ten degrees latitude, with smaller differences over the equator, and greater differences towards the poles.
Electronic ISSN:
1867-8610
Topics:
Geosciences
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