Early Comparison of OCO-3 XCO2 Measurements with TCCON
- 1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA
- 2Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
- 3Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) was successfully launched on May 4, 2019 from Kennedy Space Center via a Space-X Falcon 9. One week later, the instrument was installed as an external payload on the International Space Station (ISS). OCO-3 extends NASA’s study of carbon and measures the dry-air mole fraction of column carbon dioxide (XCO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere from space.
These space-based measurements are compared to ground-based observations from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). TCCON is a global network of high-resolution ground-based Fourier Transform Spectrometers that records spectra of the sun in the near-infrared spectral region. From these spectra, accurate and precise column-averaged abundances of atmospheric constituents including CO2 are retrieved. TCCON data are tied to the WMO scale and serve as the link between calibrated surface in situ measurements and OCO-3 measurements.
OCO-3’s agile 2-D pointing mirror assembly (PMA) allows the instrument to stare at a TCCON station as it passes overhead - providing information about the quality, biases, and errors in the OCO-3 data. Here, we show early comparisons between the OCO-3 XCO2 dataset collected during target mode observations and coincident TCCON measurements and discuss site-dependent biases and its potential origins.
How to cite: Kiel, M., Laughner, J., Eldering, A., Fisher, B., Kurosu, T., Pavlick, R., Osterman, G., Nelson, R., O'Dell, C., Somkuti, P., Taylor, T., and Roehl, C.: Early Comparison of OCO-3 XCO2 Measurements with TCCON , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9844, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9844, 2020
