The new MERLIN Instrument for Atmospheric Methane: Quality and Performance Monitoring

Kurzfassung

After water vapor and carbon dioxide, Methane is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the Earth atmosphere. The new generation space borne Lidar mission MERLIN (Methane Remote Sensing Lidar Mission) will make very sensitive measurements of the Methane distribution with unprecedented quality, i.e. 50km averaged methane columns with an accuracy of ~ 1%. After its launch in 2019, MERLIN will track down the Methane sources and sinks on a global scale. We present here one of the key ground segment work components that support MERLIN scientific activities which is Long-term Monitoring of the instrument .This function includes tracking the behavior of the instrument and its subsystems overtime as well as verification and validation of the scientific data during the entire lifetime of the mission. It mainly monitors the instrument’s performance in response to expected or unexpected natural events or technical situations. This is achieved by analyzing the measurement data and housekeeping information over different time frames. We include here some examples from our previous missions’ experience, such as from SCIAMACHY.