Retrieval of carbon monoxide profiles and total methane columns from MOPITT measurements

The Measurement of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument is designed to measure CO and CH₄ in the troposphere from a satellite platform. This instrument has been selected to be on the Earth Observing System (EOS)´s AM platform, which is scheduled to be launched in 1998. The authors present the development of retrieval algorithms and the simulation experiments performed to evaluate the algorithms and to understand certain measurement issues. The MOPITT instrument is a gas correlation spectrometer. It makes measurements in three spectral regions. The objective is to measure the CO vertical distribution from O to 15 km within 10% accuracy and the CH₄ column amount within 1% accuracy. There are four radiometers making measurements in the thermal band at 4.7 μm, which will be used to obtain profile information about the tropospheric CO distribution. Two short-wave solar reflectance channels will be used at 2.3 and 2.2 μm to measure total column amounts of CO and CH,, respectively.