Validation of SO2 retrievals from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument over NE China

The Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) launched on the NASA Aura satellite in July 2004 offers unprecedented spatial resolution, coupled with contiguous daily global coverage, for space-based UV measurements of sulfur dioxide (SO2). We present a first validation of the OMI SO2 data with in situ aircraft measurements in NE China in April 2005. The study demonstrates that OMI can distinguish between background SO2 conditions and heavy pollution on a daily basis. The noise (expressed as the standard deviation, sigma) is similar to 1.5 DU (Dobson units; 1 DU = 2.69 . 10(16) molecules/cm(2)) for instantaneous field of view boundary layer (PBL) SO2 data. Temporal and spatial averaging can reduce the noise to sigma similar to 0.3 DU over a remote region of the South Pacific; the long-term average over this remote location was within 0.1 DU of zero. Under polluted conditions collection 2 OMI data are higher than aircraft measurements by a factor of two. Improved calibrations of the radiance and irradiance data ( collection 3) result in better agreement with aircraft measurements on polluted days. The air mass-corrected collection 3 data still show positive bias and sensitivity to UV absorbing aerosols. The difference between the in situ data and the OMI SO2 measurements within 30 km of the aircraft profiles was about 1 DU, equivalent to similar to 5 ppb from 0 to 3000 m altitude. Quantifying the SO2 and aerosol profiles and spectral dependence of aerosol absorption between 310 and 330 nm are critical for an accurate estimate of SO2 from satellite UV measurements.