The Status of the TEMPO Total-Ozone and Ozone-Profile Algorithm: V04 Updates and Comprehensive Evaluations

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) mission is part of a global constellation of geostationary satellites, along with GEMS and Sentinel-4, dedicated to monitoring air quality across the Northern Hemisphere. TEMPO is the first geostationary satellite instrument to monitor air pollutants over North America on an hourly basis at nearly neighborhood-scale resolution, covering an area from Mexico City to the Canadian oil sands and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.TEMPO measures backscattered ultraviolet and visible radiation to observe several trace gases important to air quality, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and formaldehyde, with observations every 40–60 minutes and at a high spatial resolution of approximately 2 × 4.75 km². TEMPO was successfully launched in April 2023 and began nominal operations in October 2023. Since then, it has been continuously monitoring atmospheric pollutants across its observation domain.
This presentation summarizes the Version 4 (V04) updates and improvements to the TEMPO total-ozone (O3TOT) and ozone-profile (O3PROF) retrieval algorithms. This presentation also presents the evaluation of the upcoming V04 TEMPO O3TOT product through comparisons of total ozone columns (TOCs) with measurements from other satellite instruments (e.g., OMPS and TROPOMI) and ground-based instruments, including Pandora, Brewer, and Dobson spectrometers. The V04 TEMPO O3PROF algorithm, which is UV-only, is validated through comparisons of ozone profiles, tropospheric ozone, and 0–2 km ozone columns with those from the Tropospheric Ozone Lidar Network (TOLNet) and aircraft observations, as well as through validation with MLS, EPIC, TROPOMI, and OMI observations.