Monitoring of Stratospheric O3 and NO2 Profiles with SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT

Abstract

SCIAMACHY on ENVISAT offers with its limb solar backscatter, solar and lunar occultation measurement modes the opportunity to continue long term data sets of stratospheric O3 and NO2 profiles started with SAGE and HALOE. Data from SCIAMACHY is available since autumn 2002. Currently the mission will continue at least until 2010 and an extension until 2013 is currently under investigation at ESA. Stratospheric profiles derived from occultation measurements have a good data quality, but are limited in their coverage. Stratospheric profiles from the limb measurement mode allow global coverage of the stratosphere within 3 days. Nevertheless, until 2007 the limb data products of SCIAMACHY were heavily affected in their quality by large uncertainties in the knowledge of the tangent height. This was substantially improved in 2007 by implementing improved mis-alignment parameters in the operational processing chain at ESA. Consequently, the error in the limb data products is no longer dominated by the impact of the tangent height error and algorithms and the products are systematically improving.