EGU2020-10604
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10604
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Assessment of the quality of TROPOMI high-spatial-resolution NO2 data products

Xiaoyi Zhao1, Debora Griffin1, Vitali Fioletov1, Chris McLinden1, Alexander Cede2,3, Martin Tiefengraber3,4, Moritz Müeller3,4, Kristof Bognar5, Kimberly Strong5, Folkert Boersma6,7, Henk Eskes6, Jonathan Davies1, Akira Ogyu1, and Sum Chi Lee1
Xiaoyi Zhao et al.
  • 1Air Quality Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, M3H 5T4, Canada.
  • 2NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
  • 3LuftBlick, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
  • 4Department of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
  • 5Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 1A7, Canada.
  • 6Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, the Netherlands.
  • 7Environmental Sciences Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands.

The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on-board the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite (launched on 13 October 2017) is a nadir-viewing spectrometer measuring reflected sunlight in the ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and shortwave infrared spectral ranges. The measured spectra are used to retrieve total columns of trace gases, including nitrogen dioxide (NO2). In this study, Pandora NO2 measurements made at three sites located in or north of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) are used to evaluate the TROPOMI NO2 data products, including the standard Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) NO2 data product and a research data product developed by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) using a high-resolution regional air quality forecast model (used in the airmass factor calculation).

TROPOMI pixels located upwind and downwind from the Pandora sites were analyzed using a new wind-based validation method that increases the number of coincident measurements by about a factor of five compared to standard techniques. Using this larger number of coincident measurements, this work shows that both TROPOMI and Pandora instruments can reveal detailed spatial patterns (i.e., horizontal distributions) of local and transported NO2 emissions, which can be used to evaluate regional air quality changes. The TROPOMI ECCC NO2 research data product shows improved agreement with Pandora measurements compared to the TROPOMI standard tropospheric NO2 data product, demonstrating the benefit of using the high-resolution regional air quality forecast model to derive NO2 airmass factors.

How to cite: Zhao, X., Griffin, D., Fioletov, V., McLinden, C., Cede, A., Tiefengraber, M., Müeller, M., Bognar, K., Strong, K., Boersma, F., Eskes, H., Davies, J., Ogyu, A., and Lee, S. C.: Assessment of the quality of TROPOMI high-spatial-resolution NO2 data products, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-10604, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10604, 2020.