Identification

Title

Nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde measurements from the GEOstationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events (GEO-CAPE) Airborne Simulator over Houston, Texas

Abstract

The GEOstationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events (GEO-CAPE) Airborne Simulator (GCAS) was developed in support of NASA's decadal survey GEO-CAPE geostationary satellite mission. GCAS is an airborne push-broom remote-sensing instrument, consisting of two channels which make hyperspectral measurements in the ultraviolet/visible (optimized for air quality observations) and the visible–near infrared (optimized for ocean color observations). The GCAS instrument participated in its first intensive field campaign during the Deriving Information on Surface Conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality (DISCOVER-AQ) campaign in Texas in September 2013. During this campaign, the instrument flew on a King Air B-200 aircraft during 21 flights on 11 days to make air quality observations over Houston, Texas. We present GCAS trace gas retrievals of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and formaldehyde (CH2O), and compare these results with trace gas columns derived from coincident in situ profile measurements of NO2 and CH2O made by instruments on a P-3B aircraft, and with NO2 observations from ground-based Pandora spectrometers operating in direct-sun and scattered light modes. GCAS tropospheric column measurements correlate well spatially and temporally with columns estimated from the P-3B measurements for both NO2 (r2 = 0.89) and CH2O (r2 = 0.54) and with Pandora direct-sun (r2 = 0.85) and scattered light (r2 = 0.94) observed NO2 columns. Coincident GCAS columns agree in magnitude with NO2 and CH2O P-3B-observed columns to within 10% but are larger than scattered light Pandora tropospheric NO2 columns by 33% and direct-sun Pandora NO2 columns by 50%.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d73j3gxm

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-10-30T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-07-11T19:34:03.160200

Metadata language

eng; USA