The importance of digital elevation model accuracy in X_CO2 retrievals: improving the OCO-2 ACOS v11 product

Abstract. Knowledge of surface pressure is essential for calculating column average dry-air mole fractions of trace gases, such as CO₂ (X_CO2). In the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Atmospheric Carbon Observations from Space (ACOS) retrieval algorithm, the retrieved surface pressures have been found to have unacceptable errors, warranting a parametric bias correction. This correction depends on the difference between retrieved and a priori surface pressures, which are derived from a meteorological model that is hypsometrically adjusted to the surface elevation using a digital elevation model (DEM). As a result, the effectiveness of the OCO-2 bias correction is contingent upon the accuracy of the referenced DEM. Here, we investigate several different DEM datasets for use in the OCO-2 ACOS retrieval algorithm: the OCODEM used in ACOS v10 and previous versions, the NASADEM+ used in ACOS v11, the Copernicus DEM, and two polar regional DEMs (ArcticDEM and REMA). We find that variations of 10 m in DEM elevations lead to variations in X_CO2 of approximately 0.4 ppm. Given large-scale differences north of 60° N between the OCODEM and NASADEM+, we find that replacing the OCODEM with NASADEM+ yields a ∼ 100 TgC shift in inferred carbon uptake for the zones spanning 30–60° N and 60–90° N, which is on the order of 5–7 % of the estimated pan-Arctic land sink. Our analysis suggests that the Copernicus DEM has superior global continuity and accuracy compared to the other DEMs, motivating a post-processing update from OCO-2 v11 lite files (which used NASADEM+) to OCO-2 v11.1 by substituting the Copernicus DEM globally. We find that OCO-2 v11.1 improves accuracy and spatial continuity in the bias-corrected X_CO2 product relative to both v10 and v11 in high latitude regions, while resulting in marginal or no change in most regions within ± 60° latitude. In addition, OCO-2 v11.1 provides increased data throughput after quality control filtering in most regions, partly due to the change in DEM, but mostly due to other corrections to quality control parameters.