A global comparison of carbon monoxide profiles and column amounts from Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) and Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT)

In this study, we compare carbon monoxide (CO) products from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) and Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) and investigate the possible causes of the differences between retrievals for these two data sets. Direct comparisons of CO retrievals for July 2006 show that TES CO concentrations are consistently biased lower than those of MOPITT by 25 ppbv near the surface and by 20 ppbv at 150 hPa, primarily due to different a priori profiles and covariance matrices used in the TES and MOPITT CO retrievals. To reduce the effects of different a priori constraints, we apply TES a priori profiles and covariance matrices to a modified MOPITT retrieval algorithm. The mean TES-MOPITT CO difference decreases from -25 to -10 ppbv near the surface. To further account for retrieval smoothing errors due to different TES and MOPITT averaging kernels, TES averaging kernels are used to smooth MOPITT CO profiles to derive TES-equivalent CO profiles. Compared to these, TES CO profiles are biased 1 ppbv lower near the surface and 4 - 9 ppbv lower in the troposphere, and the mean absolute TES and TES-equivalent CO column difference is less than 6.5%. The mean TES and MOPITT CO differences due to smoothing errors are close to zero, and the remaining bias is primarily due to the combined effects of radiance biases, forward model errors, and the spatial and temporal mismatches of TES and MOPITT pixels.