Ozone pollution: What can we see from space? A case study

Ground-based networks associated with regional chemical transport models are used to monitor and forecast surface ozone concentrations, but coverage, representativeness, and accuracy issues remain important. Recent satellite observations have demonstrated the capacity to probe tropospheric ozone, but there has been no explicit attempt to quantify their ability to measure ozone pollution near ground.

We propose here to assess the ability of ozone sounders to detect a photochemical ozone pollution event that is supposed to be a favorable situation for satellite detection. We have chosen ozone pollution event over Europe associated with a warm conveyor belt that efficiently transports photochemically produced ozone upward. Ozone satellite products from Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2, Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), and Ozone Monitoring Instrument are analyzed here for their capacity to capture such an event.