Speaker
Description
ESA's Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme was initiated around 2010 to address the difficulties in harmonising and merging climate data records (CDR) of Essential Climate Variables (ECV) and to provide climate modellers and researchers with stable long-term time series obtained by current and past European (and third-party) satellite missions. For over a decade now, the Ozone_cci team has been continuing the development of new/improved retrieval, harmonisation and merging algorithms for ozone measurements by limb- and nadir-viewing satellite sensors. Our climate data record portfolio (https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/ozone/data) consists of vertical ozone profile products and ozone column (total, troposphere) products, each of which was characterised through ground-based validation and several of which were assessed by climate researchers. Many of the products developed and matured within CCI have been transferred to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S, https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/satellite-ozone-v1) for operational processing, ensuring up-to-date ozone CDRs for the climate monitoring and climate research communities.
In this presentation, we highlight the importance of limb and occultation observations for existing and planned CCI ozone data products. We summarise recent science results inferred from the merged zonal mean (SAGE-CCI-OMPS+) and the merged 3D-resolved (MEGRIDOP) vertical ozone profile CDRs. This is followed by an overview of CCI algorithm development and validation analyses planned until mid-2024. A homogenisation scheme will be applied to Level-2 profiles from seven limb/occultations sensors to remove biases and to estimate random uncertainty a-posteriori. These homogenised profile data sets pave the way for two new gridded ozone CDRs (vertical profile, tropospheric column), covering two decades at high resolution (daily x 1° x 1°). The IUP-UB profile retrieval scheme will be applied to measurements by the recently launched OMPS-LP sensor onboard JPSS-2. We will prototype a scheme to combine these data with those from the OMPS instrument onboard SNPP. We conclude with a brief discussion of how the validation plan will be adapted to characterize these new CCI products using ground-based reference data and to verify their compliance with user requirements.
