Speaker
Description
The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) comprises three complementary ozone sensors – Limb Profiler (LP), Nadir Profiler (NP) and Nadir Mapper (NM) - that scan the same region of the atmosphere within minutes to measure the global ozone distribution at high spatial and vertical resolution. The combination of limb and nadir instruments on the same platform enables the estimation of tropospheric ozone columns. Ozone measurements from the first OMPS on board of the Suomi NPP mission span for more than 12 years. In this study, we evaluate the new NASA version 2.6 ozone profile dataset derived from OMPS LP by comparing it with Aura Microwave Limb Sensor (MLS). The version 2.6 LP algorithm combines measurements from the ultraviolet (UV) and visible (VIS) parts of the spectra and employs second order Tikhonov regularization to retrieve a single vertical ozone profile between 12.5 km (or cloud tops) and 57.5 km with the vertical resolution of about 1.9 - 2.5 km between 20-55 km. The key improvement in version 2.6 is the reduction in relative drifts between LP ozone and correlative measurements, linked previously to a drift in the version 2.5 LP altitude registration. We evaluate monthly mean stratospheric ozone columns calculated from the LP profile measurements. Then we estimate monthly mean tropospheric columns using the total ozone columns derived from OMPS NM and compare them with the OMI/MLS tropospheric record.
