Simultaneous Retrieval of Trace Gases, Aerosols, and Cirrus Using RemoTAP—The Global Orbit Ensemble Study for the CO2M Mission

In support of the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) mission, this study evaluates the performance of the Remote sensing of Trace gas and Aerosol Product (RemoTAP) algorithm based on synthetic orbit measurements of realistic atmospheric and geophysical scenes over land. To make use of the added value of the multi-angle polarimeter (MAP) aboard the CO2M mission, the RemoTAP algorithm is developed to perform simultaneous retrieval of trace gas and aerosol properties from both MAP and CO2 imager (CO2I) measurements. At the same time, it has the capability to perform the retrieval of trace gas from only CO2I measurements. To set up the baseline tests, we apply a simple filter based on non-scattering retrievals in different CO2I bands which is able to filter out 80% of the cirrus-contaminated pixels, and after posterior filtering based on goodness of fit, 95% of the cirrus-contaminated cases are screened out. The MAP-CO2I retrieval method is able to reduce the aerosol-induced retrieval error in column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO2 (XCO2) in terms of RMSE and bias by more than a factor of 2, compared to CO2I-only retrievals on the filtered pixels. A strong correlation between XCO2 error and surface albedo in CO2I-only retrievals is significantly reduced for MAP-CO2I retrievals. Moreover, XCO2 biases in CO2I-only retrievals exhibit a significant spatiotemporal variability caused by a strong dependence on aerosol load. The biases can be up to 2 ppm over some regions, which are much larger than for the global case. It shows that only by the inclusion of MAP measurements, the large aerosol-induced biases can be mitigated, resulting in the retrievals that meet the mission requirement (precision