Articles | Volume 8, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-8-1337-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-8-1337-2015
Research article
 | 
19 Mar 2015
Research article |  | 19 Mar 2015

Potential of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor for the monitoring of terrestrial chlorophyll fluorescence

L. Guanter, I. Aben, P. Tol, J. M. Krijger, A. Hollstein, P. Köhler, A. Damm, J. Joiner, C. Frankenberg, and J. Landgraf

Abstract. Global monitoring of sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is improving our knowledge about the photosynthetic functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. The feasibility of SIF retrievals from spaceborne atmospheric spectrometers has been demonstrated by a number of studies in the last years. In this work, we investigate the potential of the upcoming TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite mission for SIF retrieval. TROPOMI will sample the 675–775 nm spectral window with a spectral resolution of 0.5 nm and a pixel size of 7 km × 7 km. We use an extensive set of simulated TROPOMI data in order to assess the uncertainty of single SIF retrievals and subsequent spatio-temporal composites. Our results illustrate the enormous improvement in SIF monitoring achievable with TROPOMI with respect to comparable spectrometers currently in-flight, such as the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) instrument. We find that TROPOMI can reduce global uncertainties in SIF mapping by more than a factor of 2 with respect to GOME-2, which comes together with an approximately 5-fold improvement in spatial sampling. Finally, we discuss the potential of TROPOMI to map other important vegetation parameters at a global scale with moderate spatial resolution and short revisit time. Those include leaf photosynthetic pigments and proxies for canopy structure, which will complement SIF retrievals for a self-contained description of vegetation condition and functioning.

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Short summary
This paper investigates the potential of the upcoming TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) instrument for the retrieval of the chlorophyll fluorescence signal emitted in the 650–850nm spectral range by the photosynthetic machinery of green plants. We find that TROPOMI will allow substantial improvements in the space monitoring of fluorescence with respect to current spaceborne instruments such as GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY.