Assessing TEMPO Level 2 NO2 and HCHO Products with Airborne Spectrometer Data (Invited Presentation)

With the arrival of geostationary satellite observations of air quality from TEMPO comes the expectation of communicating the quality of the data products. This presentation will highlight validation results for TEMPO Level 2 NO₂ and HCHO column data products using airborne spectrometer data from the Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science study (STAQS) in August 2023. Between TEMPO’s first Earth observations on August 2^nd and the last flight date for STAQS on August 26^th, 2023, coincident measurements under TEMPO were made by the GeoCAPE Airborne Simulator (GCAS) during 11 days spanning from early morning through the late afternoon. Coincidences included 97 TEMPO scans over the North American cities of Chicago, New York City, Toronto, and Los Angeles. While GCAS is subject to the same types of uncertainties in its retrieval as TEMPO, its measurements are at a much finer spatial scale. This allows for assessment of the impact of spatial heterogeneity as well as an in-depth look on the impact of a priori information for the TEMPO retrieval with respect to clouds and surface albedo. This presentation will end with an outlook for future work with additional airborne data collected since STAQS and in the future.