GOME-2 Level 2 Vertical Ozone Profiles High Resolution Release 1 - Metop-A and -B

The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) measures the radiance spectrum of sunlight scattered from the atmosphere in the (UV) wavelength region 260-330 nm. The absorption of ozone decreases with increasing wavelength. This differential absorption makes it possible to derive the vertical distribution of ozone in the atmosphere from the measured UV spectrum.

The vertical ozone profiles are given as partial ozone columns in Dobson Units (DU) in 40 layers from the surface up to 0.001 hPa. The ground pixel size corresponds to the footprint of the Band-1b integration time, which usually means 40 x 80 km2 (along-track x cross-track, see also resolution above).

Validation

The product contains the retrieved vertical ozone profile, the full error covariance matrix, the retrieval noise covariance matrix, the a-priori profile, the averaging kernels and the retrieved auxiliary parameters, like surface or cloud albedo. Also included are: geo-location, the specific spectral windows used and retrieval diagnostics, like the number of iterations and spectral fit indicators.