ESA's Atmospheric Chemistry Mission - A Status Report

Abstract

The challenges in understanding the atmospheric chemistry processes for climate research and to model and forecast the air quality on regional scale are still manifold. Presently, ESA is providing atmospheric chemistry data both from their core missions ERS-2 and Envisat as well as from Third Party Missions (TPM). ESAs core atmospheric chemistry instruments onboard ERS-2 and ENVISAT are GOME, GOMOS, MIPAS and SCIAMACHY. With ERS-2 launched in 1995 and ENVISAT in 2002, these instruments are providing a rich dataset to the scientific community and supporting operational services since more than 14 years. Currently, data from the following missions can be provided through ESA: ACE-FTS and MAESTRO data from the CSA SCISAT mission, OSIRIS and SMR data from the SSC ODIN mission, TANSO-FTS AND -CAI data from the JAXA/NIES/MOE GOSAT mission. It is currently planned that also OMI data from the NASA AURA mission will be accessible through ESA. In addition to the operational data, ESA acknowledges that the science community is developing and providing a number of important, quality products based on ESA missions. The presentation will summarise the status of all the issues addressed above with a focus on ESA instruments, algorithm development and data distribution.