Abstract

The trace gas observations from satellites can be the powerfull tools for the validation of tropospheric models, because of their global coverage in space and time. For verification of tropospheric models GOME spectrometer [1], which will be launched on ERS-2 satellite in 1994 should be able to measure the changes in tropospheric column densities of species occuring in the atmosphere. The trace species for which the tropospheric columns could be observed by GOME spectrometer are: ozone O₃, nitrogen dioxide NO₂, sulfur dioxide SO₂ and formaldehyde HCHO. In this study we tried to answer the question: what is the sensitivity of GOME spectrometer for the measurement of changes in the tropospheric column densities of these species. We applied only forward modeling to see how large should be the changes in tropospheric column densities of these species to cause the change of GOME signal which will exceed the noise level of the instrument. Though, it is the lowest boarder of detectibility, we tried to find out, and the error caused by the retrieval procedure must be added to our results.

© 1993 Optical Society of America