ESA's Atmospheric Chemistry Mission - A Status Report

Abstract

The successful monitoring of the Earth's atmospheric composition and its thorough understanding strongly depend on the availability of adequate sensors performing accurate measurements, as well as on the quality of the information extracted from observations. Quality assessment of instrument performances and data products is therefore essential to provide to the science community the best available information with a well defined level of confidence. Focussing on SCIAMACHY, successfully operating since 2002 on-board the ESA ENVISAT platform, this poster reports on the instrument and products monitoring activities carried out by the IDEAS (Instrument Data quality Evaluation and Analysis Service) team in order to assure the reliability of SCIAMACHY disseminated products. The most relevant quality insurance activities for the SCIAMACHY mission are presented and discussed. Particular emphasis is addressed to the evolution aspects brought by the improvements recently introduced in the algorithms for both Level 1b and Level 2 processing and to the planned data re-processing campaign.