New Version Global SO2 Product from Aura/OMI: Status Update, Quality Assessment, and Science Applications

Since its launch in 2004, the Dutch/Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard the NASA Aura spacecraft has been providing valuable global monitoring of anthropogenic and volcanic SO₂ sources. The OMI standard SO₂ product has seen major updates in recent years that were enabled by advances in retrieval techniques, particularly the Goddard PCA-based spectral fitting algorithm. In this presentation, we will report on the latest version of the OMI SO₂ data product, expected to be released in Summer/Fall of 2019. Updates implemented in this version include an updated spectral fitting scheme, an extended lookup table for SO₂ Jacobian calculations, improved retrievals over snow/ice covered surfaces, as well as the use of the latest version 9 OMI total ozone product (OMTO3) as input. We will discuss the improvements and changes in OMI SO₂ retrievals introduced by these updates and provide a comprehensive assessment of the data quality. We will also discuss new science analyses enabled by these new algorithmic features. In particular, we will focus on the expanded spatial and temporal coverage at northern high latitudes that will provide more data for emission estimates and for studying long-range transport into the Arctic. We will also discuss plans to further improve OMI SO₂ retrievals and to extend the long-term OMI record with consistent retrievals from OMPS and TROPOMI.