References

ACP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ACP

1680-7324

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acp-12-1823-2012

Validation of TES methane with HIPPO aircraft observations: implications for inverse modeling of methane sources

Wecht

K. J.

¹ Jacob

D. J.

¹ Wofsy

S. C.

¹ Kort

E. A.

¹ Worden

J. R.

² Kulawik

S. S.

² Henze

D. K.

³ Kopacz

⁴ ⁶ Payne

V. H.

⁵

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA

Atmospheric Environmental Research, Lexington, MA, USA

now at: NOAA Climate Program Office, Silver Spring, MD, USA

17 02 2012

12 4 1823 1832

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/1823/2012/acp-12-1823-2012.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/1823/2012/acp-12-1823-2012.pdf

We validate satellite methane observations from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) with 151 aircraft vertical profiles over the Pacific from the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observation (HIPPO) program. We find that a collocation window of ±750 km and ±24 h does not introduce significant error in comparing TES and aircraft profiles. We validate both the TES standard product (V004) and an experimental product with two pieces of information in the vertical (V005). We determine a V004 mean bias of 65.8 ppb and random instrument error of 43.3 ppb. For V005 we determine a mean bias of 42.3 ppb and random instrument error of 26.5 ppb in the upper troposphere, and mean biases (random instrument errors) in the lower troposphere of 28.8 (28.7) and 16.9 (28.9) ppb at high and low latitudes respectively. Even when V005 cannot retrieve two pieces of information it still performs better than V004. An observation system simulation experiment (OSSE) with the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model (CTM) and its adjoint shows that TES V004 has only limited value for constraining methane sources. Our successful validation of V005 encourages its production as a standard retrieval to replace V004.

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