Minimizing aerosol effects on the OMI tropospheric NO₂ retrieval - An improved use of the 477nm O₂-O₂ band and an estimation of the aerosol correction uncertainty

Global mapping of satellite tropospheric NO₂ vertical column density (VCD), a key gas in air quality monitoring, requires accurate retrievals over complex urban and industrialized areas and under any atmospheric conditions. The high abundance of aerosol particles in regions dominated by anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion, e.g....

A weighted least squares approach to retrieve aerosol layer height over bright surfaces applied to GOME-2 measurements of the oxygen A band for forest fire cases over Europe

This paper presents a weighted least squares approach to retrieve aerosol layer height from top-of-atmosphere reflectance measurements in the oxygen A band (758-770g nm) over bright surfaces. A property of the measurement error covariance matrix is discussed, due to which photons travelling from the surface are given a higher preference over...

Error sources in the retrieval of aerosol information over bright surfaces from satellite measurements in the oxygen A band

Retrieving aerosol optical thickness and aerosol layer height over a bright surface from measured top-of-atmosphere reflectance spectrum in the oxygen A band is known to be challenging, often resulting in large errors. In certain atmospheric conditions and viewing geometries, a loss of sensitivity to aerosol optical thickness has been...

An exploratory study on the aerosol height retrieval from OMI measurements of the 477 nmO₂ O₂ spectral band using a neural network approach

This paper presents an exploratory study on the aerosol layer height (ALH) retrieval from the OMI 477nm O₂ O₂ spectral band. We have developed algorithms based on the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network (NN) approach and applied them to 3-year (2005-2007) OMI cloud-free scenes over north-east Asia, collocated with...

Improvements to the OMI O₂-O₂ operational cloud algorithm and comparisons with ground-based radar-lidar observations

The OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument on board NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura satellite) OMCLDO2 cloud product supports trace gas retrievals of for example ozone and nitrogen dioxide. The OMCLDO2 algorithm derives the effective cloud fraction and effective cloud pressure using a DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) fit...