Investigating the Performance of Carbon Monoxide and Methane Observations from Sentinel-5 Precursor in China

Since its launch on 13 October 2017, the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board the Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) mission has been measuring the solar radiation backscattered by Earth’s atmosphere and surface. In this study, we evaluate the TROPOMI operational methane (CH4) and carbon monoxide (CO) products’ performance results covering about 3 years using the only two global Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) sites in China, i.e., the Hefei site and the Xianghe site. These two sites have recently joined the TCCON, and this study uses the both sites simultaneously to validate the TROPOMI products over China for the first time. We found that the systematic bias with rescaling between the TROPOMI CO products and the Hefei site is on average 1.78 ± 6.35 ppb or 1.18 ± 5.35%. The systematic bias with rescaling between the TROPOMI CO products and the Xianghe site is on average 5.33 ± 14.24 ppb or 3.85 ± 10.30%. Both the stations show a correlation above 0.9. The TROPOMI CO data are systematically higher than the two TCCON sites measurements in China. We found that the systematic bias with rescaling between the TROPOMI CH4 products and the Hefei site is on average −4.13 ± 11.65 ppb or −0.22 ± 0.62%. The systematic bias between the TROPOMI CH4 products and Xianghe site is on average −7.25 ± 10.72 ppb or −0.39 ± 0.57%. Both the stations show a correlation above 0.9. The TROPOMI CH4 data are systematically lower than the two TCCON sites measurements in China. We found that the bias between the TROPOMI and the two sites’ data as a function of the coincident radius around the two sites is mostly affected by localized emissions for both CO and CH4. We also observe a CO decreasing trend and a CH4 increasing trend in the year-to-year relative changes from 2019 to 2021. Validating against reference from Hefei and Xianghe TCCON site demonstrates the high quality of TROPOMI CO and CH4 data over China.

[1]  T. Borsdorff,et al.  Satellite Observations Reveal a Large CO Emission Discrepancy From Industrial Point Sources Over China , 2022, Geophysical Research Letters.

[2]  T. Borsdorff,et al.  Quantifying CO emission rates of industrial point sources from Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument observations , 2021, Environmental Research Letters.

[3]  T. Borsdorff,et al.  Validation of Methane and Carbon Monoxide from Sentinel-5 Precursor using TCCON and NDACC-IRWG stations , 2021, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

[4]  N. Kumps,et al.  New ground-based Fourier-transform near-infrared solar absorption measurements of XCO2, XCH4 and XCO at Xianghe, China , 2020, Earth System Science Data.

[5]  T. Borsdorff,et al.  Monitoring CO emissions of the metropolis Mexico City using TROPOMI CO observations , 2020, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

[6]  R. Gautam,et al.  Satellite observations reveal extreme methane leakage from a natural gas well blowout , 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[7]  Yuzhou Luo,et al.  Estimating ground-level CO concentrations across China based on the national monitoring network and MOPITT: potentially overlooked CO hotspots in the Tibetan Plateau , 2019, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

[8]  S. Pandey,et al.  Carbon monoxide air pollution on sub-city scales and along arterial roads detected by the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument , 2019, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

[9]  S. Pandey,et al.  What caused the extreme CO concentrations during the 2017 high-pollution episode in India? , 2018, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

[10]  Haili Hu,et al.  Mapping carbon monoxide pollution from space down to city scales with daily global coverage , 2018, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

[11]  M. Omara,et al.  Assessment of methane emissions from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain , 2018, Science.

[12]  Haili Hu,et al.  The operational methane retrieval algorithm for TROPOMI , 2016 .

[13]  Haili Hu,et al.  Carbon monoxide total column retrievals from TROPOMI shortwave infrared measurements , 2016 .

[14]  V. Brovkin,et al.  The Global Methane Budget 2000–2017 , 2016, Earth System Science Data.

[15]  Henk Eskes,et al.  TROPOMI on the ESA Sentinel-5 Precursor: A GMES mission for global observations of the atmospheric composition for climate, air quality and ozone layer applications , 2012 .

[16]  James B. Abshire,et al.  Calibration of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network using aircraft profile data , 2010 .

[17]  Clive D Rodgers,et al.  Inverse Methods for Atmospheric Sounding: Theory and Practice , 2000 .

[18]  Tracey Holloway,et al.  Global distribution of carbon monoxide , 2000 .

[19]  Michael B. McElroy,et al.  Three-dimensional climatological distribution of tropospheric OH: Update and evaluation , 2000 .

[20]  V. Connors,et al.  Spaceborne observations of the global distribution of carbon monoxide in the middle troposphere during April and October 1994 , 1999 .

[21]  Youwen Sun,et al.  Characterisation of methane variability and trends from near-infrared solar spectra over Hefei, China , 2018 .