Potential of Observations from the Tropospheric
Emission Spectrometer to Constrain Continental Sources of Carbon Monoxide
Dylan B. A. Jones, Kevin W. Bowman,
Paul I. Palmer, John R. Worden, Daniel J. Jacob, Ross N. Hoffman, Isabelle
Bey, and Robert M. Yantosca
Journal of Geophys. Res., 108(D24), 4789, doi:10.1029/2003JD003702, 2003.
Abstract
We have conducted an observing system simulation experiment for the
Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) satellite instrument to determine
the potential of nadir retrievals of carbon monoxide (CO) from this
instrument to constrain estimates of continental sources of CO. We use the
GEOS-CHEM global chemical transport model to produce a pseudo-atmosphere in
which the relationship between sources and concentrations of CO is known.
Linear profile retrievals of CO are calculated by sampling this pseudo
atmosphere along the orbit of TES. These retrievals are used as
pseudo-observations with a maximum a posteriori inverse algorithm to
estimate the CO sources from the different continents. This algorithm
accounts for the finite vertical resolution of the retrieval, instrument
errors, and representation and transport errors in the GEOS-CHEM simulation
of CO. The structure of the transport error is estimated using the
statistics of the difference between paired GEOS-CHEM forecasts of CO, and
this structure is then scaled to match the model error in the GEOS-CHEM
simulation of aircraft observations of Asian outflow over the NW Pacific. We
show that, with proper characterization of observation errors, just 2 weeks
of observations from TES have the potential to constrain estimates of
continental sources of CO to within 10%.
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