ESA Greenhouse Gases Climate Change Initiative (GHG_cci): Column averaged carbon dioxide from OCO-2 generated with the FOCAL algorithm, version 08

This dataset contains column-average dry-air mole fractions of atmospheric carbon dioxide (XCO2), using the fast atmospheric trace gas retrieval for OCO2 (FOCAL-OCO2). The FOCAL-OCO2 algorithm which has been setup to retrieve XCO2 by analysing hyper spectral solar backscattered radiance measurements from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite. FOCAL includes a radiative transfer model which has been developed to approximate light scattering effects by multiple scattering at an optically thin scattering layer. This reduces the computational costs by several orders of magnitude. FOCAL's radiative transfer model is utilised to simulate the radiance in all three OCO-2 spectral bands allowing the simultaneous retrieval of CO2, H2O, and solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence. The product is limited to cloud-free scenes on the Earth's day side. This dataset is also referred to as CO2_OC2_FOCA. This version of the data was produced as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Greenhouse Gases (GHG) project (GHG-CCI+, http://cci.esa.int/ghg) and got co-funding from the Univ. Bremen and EU H2020 projects CHE (grant agreement no. 776186) and VERIFY (grant agreement no. 776810).