Articles | Volume 9, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-1671-2016
© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-1671-2016
© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
The potential of clear-sky carbon dioxide satellite retrievals
Robert R. Nelson
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Christopher W. O'Dell
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Thomas E. Taylor
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lukas Mandrake
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Mike Smyth
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
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Short summary
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We provide an analysis of an 11-year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations derived using an optimal estimation retrieval algorithm on measurements made by the GOSAT satellite. The new product (version 9) shows improvement over the previous version (v7.3) as evaluated against independent estimates of CO2 from ground-based sensors and atmospheric inversion systems. We also compare the new GOSAT CO2 values to collocated estimates from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2.
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Short summary
In this work, we test the hypothesis that clear-sky retrievals may perform as well as full-physics retrievals for very clear scenes. It was found that for simulated OCO-2 measurements, the clear-sky retrieval had errors comparable to those of the full-physics retrieval. For real GOSAT data, the clear-sky retrieval had errors 0–20 % larger than the full-physics retrieval over land and 20–35 % larger over ocean. This work implies that clear-sky retrievals may be more useful than previously assumed.
In this work, we test the hypothesis that clear-sky retrievals may perform as well as...