Ground-based validation of the Copernicus Sentinel-5P TROPOMI NO2 measurements with the NDACC ZSL-DOAS, MAX-DOAS and Pandonia global networks

This paper reports on consolidated ground-based validation results of the atmospheric NO2 data produced operationally since April 2018 by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board of the ESA/EU Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite. Tropospheric, stratospheric, and total NO2 column data from S5P are compared to correlative measurements collected from, respectively, 19 Multi-Axis Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS), 26 Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) Zenith-Scattered-Light DOAS (ZSL-DOAS), and 25 Pandonia Global Network (PGN)/Pandora instruments distributed globally. The validation methodology gives special care to minimizing mismatch errors due to imperfect spatio-temporal co-location of the satellite and correlative data, e.g. by using tailored observation operators to account for differences in smoothing and in sampling of atmospheric structures and variability and photochemical modelling to reduce diurnal cycle effects. Compared to the ground-based measurements, S5P data show, on average, (i) a negative bias for the tropospheric column data, of typically −23 % to −37 % in clean to slightly polluted conditions but reaching values as high as −51 % over highly polluted areas; (ii) a slight negative median difference for the stratospheric column data, of about −0.2 Pmolec cm−2, i.e. approx. −2 % in summer to −15 % in winter; and (iii) a bias ranging from zero to −50 % for the total column data, found to depend on the amplitude of the total NO2 column, with small to slightly positive bias values for columns below 6 Pmolec cm−2 and negative values above. The dispersion between S5P and correlative measurements contains mostly random components, which remain within mission requirements for the stratospheric column data (0.5 Pmolec cm−2) but exceed those for the tropospheric column data (0.7 Pmolec cm−2). While a part of the biases and dispersion may be due to representativeness differences such as different area averaging and measurement times, it is known that errors in the S5P tropospheric columns exist due to shortcomings in the (horizontally coarse) a priori profile representation in the TM5-MP chemical transport model used in the S5P retrieval and, to a lesser extent, to the treatment of cloud effects and aerosols. Although considerable differences (up to 2 Pmolec cm−2 and more) are observed at single ground-pixel level, the near-real-time (NRTI) and offline (OFFL) versions of the S5P NO2 operational data processor provide similar NO2 column values and validation results when globally averaged, with the NRTI values being on average 0.79 % larger than the OFFL values. This research has been supported by the ESA/ESRIN (grant no. 4000117151/16/I-LG) and the BELSPO/ESA ProDEx (TROVA-E2 (PEA grant no. 4000116692)). Part of the reported work was carried out in the framework of the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor Mission Performance Centre (S5P MPC), contracted by the European Space Agency and supported by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO), the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Part of this work was carried out also in the framework of the S5P Validation Team (S5PVT) AO projects NIDFORVAL (ID no. 28607, PI Gaia Pinardi, BIRA-IASB) and CESAR (ID no. 28596, PI Arnoud Apituley, KNMI). The authors express special thanks to Ann Mari Fjæraa, José Granville, Sander Niemeijer, and Olivier Rasson for post-processing of the network and satellite data and for their dedication to the S5P operational validation. The LATMOS real-time processing facility is acknowledged for fast delivery of ZSL-DOAS SAOZ data. Fast delivery of MAX-DOAS data tailored to the S5P validation was organized through the S5PVT AO project NIDFORVAL. The authors are grateful to ESA/ESRIN for supporting the ESA Validation Data Centre (EVDC) established at NILU and for running the Fiducial Reference Measurements (FRM) programme and in particular the FRM4DOAS and Pandonia projects. The PGN is a bilateral project between NASA and ESA, and the NASA funding for the PGN is provided through the NASA Tropospheric Composition Program and Goddard Space Flight Center Pandora project. The MAX-DOAS, ZSL-DOAS, and PGN instrument PIs and staff at the stations are thanked warmly for their sustained effort on maintaining high-quality measurements and for valuable scientific discussions. Aleksandr Elokhov and Aleksandr Gruzdev acknowledge national funding from RFBR through the project 20-95-00274. IUP Bremen acknowledges DLR Bonn for funding received through project 50EE1709A. The SAOZ network acknowledges funding from the French Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers (INSU) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), and Institut polaire français Paul Emile Victor (IPEV). Work done by Hitoshi Irie was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-1901) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan, JSPS KAKENHI (grant nos. JP19H04235 and JP17K00529), the JAXA 2nd Research Announcement on the Earth Observations (grant no. 19RT000351), and JST CREST (grant no. JPMJCR15K4). The University of Toronto ZSL-DOAS measurements at Eureka were made at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) by the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change (CANDAC), with support from the Canadian Space Agency (AVATARS project), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (PAHA project), and Environment and Climate Change Canada. 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