One year of Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde retrievals – Algorithm description, recent updates and performance assessment

We present the status of the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and formaldehyde (HCHO) retrievals from its first year of operations. After multiple version updates, the TEMPO Level 2 NO₂ and HCHO products have undergone significant enhancements to improve the performance and accuracy of the slant column retrievals, air mass factor calculations and post-processing corrections including destriping for NO₂ and background for HCHO. We illustrate the performance of both retrievals, evaluating their fitting uncertainty and showing comparisons with independent correlative measurements and other satellite products showcasing small noise levels and remarkable accuracy with well quantified biases. We continue by illustrating the capacity of TEMPO products focusing on different case studies showing TEMPO’s high temporal and spatial resolution. We finalize discussing aspects of the retrieval subject to improvement and our plans to address them.