SCIAMACHY L2 Ground Processor V. 7 Phase F Re-processing

Abstract

SCIAMACHY (SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric ChartographY) aboard ESA's environmental satellite ENVISAT observed the Earth's atmosphere in limb, nadir, and solar/lunar occultation geometries covering the UV-Visible to NIR spectral range. It is a joint project of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium and was launched in February 2002. SCIAMACHY doubled its originally planed in-orbit lifetime of five years before the communication to ENVISAT was severed in April 2012, and the mission entered its post-operational phase. In order to preserve the best quality of the outstanding data recorded obtained by SCIAMACHY, the data processors were updated in phase F and the whole mission was reprocessed. In addition to the usual updates, the following items were added to the processor 1. Tropospheric BrO, a new retrieval based on the scientific algorithm of (Theys et al., 2011). This algorithm had been originally developed for the GOME-2 sensor and later adapted for SCIAMACHY. 2. Improved cloud flagging using limb measurements. Limb cloud flags are already part of the SCIAMACHY L2 product. They are currently calculated based on the scientific algorithm by (Eichmann et al., 2015). Clouds are categorized into four types: water, ice, polar stratospheric and noctilucent clouds. 3. A new, future-proof file format for the level 2 product based on NetCDF. We will present results from the verification and the mission re-processing.