SAFARI 2000 TOMS TROPOSPHERIC OZONE DATA, SOUTHERN AFRICA SUBSET, DRY SEASON 2000

Tropical Tropospheric Ozone (TTO) data from Earth Probe (EP) Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) for the period of August 8-September 29, 2000 were processed and provided by the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch at NASA/GSFC for the SAFARI 2000 Dry Season Aircraft Campaign.The TTO measurement is derived from TOMS total ozone (Thompson and Hudson, 1999; Thompson et al., 2001) using the modified-residual method to separate stratospheric ozone from tropospheric ozone. The tropospheric ozone column thickness is reported in Dobson Units (DU).EP TOMS is currently the only NASA spacecraft on orbit specializing in ozone retrieval. EP TOMS was launched in 1996 into an orbit 500 km rather than the 950 km that was originally planned. The Earth Probe satellite was boosted to 740 km in 1997 when the ADEOS satellite failed. The lower orbit of EP TOMS decreased the size of the footprint of each measurement, which increased the resolution and also increased the ability to make measurements over cloudless scenes. This orbit was chosen to improve the ability of the TOMS instrument to make measurements of UV-absorbing aerosols in the troposphere and enhanced the capability of converting the TOMS aerosol measurements into geophysical quantities such as optical depth. Tropospheric aerosols play a major role in the Earth's climate and the capability to measure them from a TOMS instrument had recently been developed using data from Nimbus-7 and Meteor-3 TOMS.The TOMS Tropospheric Ozone data are 9-day averaged, gridded (1-degree by 2-degree) ASCII products. There is also a GIF image of each data file.