Relative drifts and biases between six ozone limb satellite measurements from the last decade

Abstract

Abstract. As part of ESA's climate change initiative high vertical resolution ozone profiles from three instruments all aboard ESA's Envisat (GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY) in combination with ESA's third party missions (OSIRIS, SMR, ACE-FTS) are to be combined in order to create an essential climate variable data record for the last decade. A prerequisite before combining data is the examination of differences and drifts between the datasets. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of ozone profile differences based on pairwise collocated measuerements, including the evolution of the differences with time. Such a diagnosis is helpful to identify strengths and weaknesses of each data set that may vary in time and introduce uncertainties in long-term trend estimates. Main results of this paper indicate that the 6 instruments perform well in the stratosphere particularly between 20 and 40 km with a mean relative difference of ±5% (middle latitudes) to ±10% (tropics). Larger differences and variability in the differences are found in the upper troposphere lower stratosphere region and in the mesosphere. The analysis reveals that the relative drift between the sensors is not statistically significant for most pairs of instruments.