AerGOM, an improved algorithm for stratospheric aerosol extinction retrieval from GOMOS observations – Part 1: Algorithm description

Filip Vanhellemont (1) , Nina Mateshvili (1) , Laurent Blanot (2) , Charles Etienne Robert (1) , Christine Bingen (1) , Viktoria Sofieva (3) , Francis Dalaudier (4) , Cédric Tétard (1) , Didier Fussen (1) , Emmanuel Dekemper (1) , Erkki Kyrölä (3) , Marko Laine (3) , Johanna Tamminen (3) , Claus Zehner (5)

1 BIRA-IASB - Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy / Institut d'Aéronomie Spatiale de Belgique
2 ACRI-ST - Analytic and Computational Research, Inc. - Earth Sciences
3 FMI - Finnish Meteorological Institute
4 STRATO - LATMOS
5 ESRIN - European Space Research Institute

The GOMOS instrument on Envisat has successfully demonstrated that a UV–Vis–NIR spaceborne stellar occultation instrument is capable of delivering quality data on the gaseous and particulate composition of Earth's atmosphere. Still, some problems related to data inversion remained to be examined. In the past, it was found that the aerosol extinction profile retrievals in the upper troposphere and stratosphere are of good quality at a reference wavelength of 500 nm but suffer from anomalous, retrieval-related perturbations at other wavelengths. Identification of algo-rithmic problems and subsequent improvement was therefore necessary. This work has been carried out; the resulting AerGOM Level 2 retrieval algorithm together with the first data version AerGOMv1.0 forms the subject of this paper. The AerGOM algorithm differs from the standard GOMOS IPF processor in a number of important ways: more accurate physical laws have been implemented, all retrieval-related covariances are taken into account, and the aerosol extinction spectral model is strongly improved. Retrieval examples demonstrate that the previously observed profile perturbations have disappeared, and the obtained extinction spectra look in general more consistent. We present a detailed validation study in a companion paper; here, to give a first idea of the data quality, a worst-case comparison at 386 nm shows SAGE II–AerGOM correlation coefficients that are up to 1 order of magnitude larger than the ones obtained with the GOMOS IPFv6.01 data set.

Domains: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics [physics.ao-ph]

Filip Vanhellemont, Nina Mateshvili, Laurent Blanot, Charles Etienne Robert, Christine Bingen, et al.. AerGOM, an improved algorithm for stratospheric aerosol extinction retrieval from GOMOS observations – Part 1: Algorithm description. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, 2016, 9 (9), pp.4687-4700. ⟨10.5194/amt-9-4687-2016⟩. ⟨insu-01370001⟩