Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2023-48
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2023-48
26 May 2023
 | 26 May 2023
Status: this preprint is currently under review for the journal AMT.

The IASI NH3 version 4 product: averaging kernels and improved consistency

Lieven Clarisse, Bruno Franco, Martin Van Damme, Tommaso Di Gioacchino, Juliette Hadji-Lazaro, Simon Whitburn, Lara Noppen, Daniel Hurtmans, Cathy Clerbaux, and Pierre Coheur

Abstract. Satellite measurements play an increasingly important role in the study of atmospheric ammonia (NH3). Here, we present version 4 of the Artificial Neural Network for IASI (ANNI) retrieval of NH3. The main change is the introduction of total column averaging kernels (AVKs), which can be used to undo the effect of the vertical profile shape assumption of the retrieval. While the main equations can be matched term for term with analogous ones used in UV/Vis retrievals for other minor absorbers, we derive the formalism from the ground up, as its applicability to thermal infrared measurements is non-trivial. A large number of other smaller changes were introduced in ANNI v4, most of which improve the consistency of the measurements, across time and across the series of IASI instruments. This includes a more robust way of calculating the hyperspectral range index (HRI), explicitly accounting for long-term changes in CO2 in the HRI calculation and the use of a reprocessed cloud product that was specifically developed for climate applications. The NH3 distributions derived with ANNI v4 are very similar to the ones derived with v3, although values are about 15–20 % larger due to the improved setup of the HRI. We exclude further large biases of the same nature, by showing the consistency between ANNI v4 derived NH3 columns with columns obtained with an optimal estimation approach. Finally, with v4, we revised the uncertainty budget and now report systematic uncertainty estimates alongside random uncertainties, allowing realistic mean uncertainties to be estimated.

Lieven Clarisse et al.

Status: open (until 30 Jun 2023)

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Lieven Clarisse et al.

Lieven Clarisse et al.

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Short summary
Ammonia is an important atmospheric pollutant. This article presents version 4 of the algorithm which retrieves abundances from the infrared measurements of the satellite sounder IASI. A measurement operator is introduced that can be used to emulate the measurements (so-called averaging kernels) and measurement uncertainty is better characterized. Several other changes to the product itself are also documented, most of which improve the temporal consistency of the 2007–2022 IASI NH3 dataset.