Three years of global carbon monoxide from SCIAMACHY: comparison with MOPITT and first results related to the detection of enhanced CO over cities

Abstract

Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important atmospheric constituent affecting air quality and climate. SCIAMACHY on ENVISAT is currently the only satellite instrument that can measure the vertical column of CO with nearly equal sensitivity at all altitudes down to the Earth's surface because of its near-infrared nadir observations of reflected solar radiation. Here we present three years' (2003–2005) of SCIAMACHY CO columns consistently retrieved with the latest version of our retrieval algorithm (WFMDv0.6). We describe the retrieval method and discuss the multi-year global CO data set focusing on a comparison with the operational CO column data product of MOPITT. We found reasonable to good agreement (~20%) with MOPITT, with the best agreement for 2004. We present detailed results for various regions (Europe, Middle East, India, China) and discuss to what extent enhanced levels of CO can be detected over populated areas including individual cities. The expected CO signal from cities is close to or even below the detection limit of individual measurements. We show that cities can be identified when averaging long time series.