Statistical characteristics of total ozone measurements by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer Original Research Article

An attempt is made to study the accuracy and the precision of the total ozone data observed by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on board Nimbus 7 and Meteor 3 satellites. Two TOMS instruments have shown statistically significant mean bias at 5% level. Averaged total ozone contours sometimes coincide with coast lines indicating some problem in the treatment of surface albedo. Systematic errors are noticed in TOMS data especially in the tropics. By using the ground-based Dobson data, such errors are identified as those being correlated to the errors at other locations. The estimated variances are 5–10 DU2 for random errors in the Dobson data, 2–3 DU2 for random errors and 10 DU2 for systematic errors in the TOMS data in the tropics.