Recent studies show that air pollution also affects Africa. Air quality is worsening in large cities with growing populations. Satellite observations over some Central African cities seem to confirm this pollution for species such as NO2, HCHO and aerosols. The sources of pollution are generally different from those found in Europe for example. In Central Africa, particularly in the Congo Basin, the main sources of NO2 and HCHO emissions are forest fires and the use of embers in cooking. Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a large megalopolis of about 11 million inhabitants, like several other large cities in Africa, lack ground-based atmospheric measurement systems. To improve this situation, the researchers of the University of Kinshasa (Unikin) in collaboration with the UV-Vis group of the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (IASB) have set up a first installation of a simple atmospheric observation equipment. This equipment was installed on the roof of the Faculty of Sciences of Unikin ( -4.42°S, 15.31°E) in May 2017 and has operated until November 2019. The instrument is based on a compact AVANTES spectrometer covering the spectral range 290 - 450 nm with 0.7 nm resolution. The spectrometer is a Czerny-Turner type with an entry slit of 50 µm wide, and an array of 1200 l/mm. A 10 m long and 600 µm thick diameter optical fiber is connected to the spectrometer to receive the incident light beam from the sky. Measurements were mainly made by looking in a fixed direction. In November 2019, a Multi-Axis DOAS instrument (MAX-DOAS) has been installed to replace the first instrument. The measurements clearly show the signature of polluting species such as NO2 and HCHO in Kinshasa's atmosphere. In this study, we therefore show all the different steps of the algorithm we used to obtain the vertical columns from the observations of the instrument installed in Kinshasa. We present a first comparison of these ground-based observations of NO2 in Kinshasa with those from the OMI and TROPOMI satellites for clear days between May and November 2017.
Abstract. Volcanic eruptions emit plumes of ash and gases into the atmosphere, potentially at very high altitudes. Ash-rich plumes are hazardous for airplanes as ash is very abrasive and easily melts inside their engines. With more than 50 active volcanoes per year and the ever-increasing number of commercial flights, the safety of airplanes is a real concern. Satellite measurements are ideal for monitoring global volcanic activity and, in combination with atmospheric dispersion models, to track and forecast volcanic plumes. Here we present the Support to Aviation Control Service (SACS, http://sacs.aeronomie.be), which is a free online service initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the near-real-time (NRT) satellite monitoring of volcanic plumes of SO2 and ash. It combines data from three ultraviolet (UV)-visible and three infrared (IR) spectrometers. The UV-vis sensors are the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) on-board the two polar orbiting meteorological satellites (MetOp-A & MetOp-B) operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). The IR sensors are the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) on-board MetOp-A & MetOp-B. This new multi-sensor warning system of volcanic emissions is based on the selective detection of SO2 and ash. This system is optimised to avoid false alerts while at the same time limiting the number of notifications in case of large plumes. A successful rate with more than 95% of notifications corresponding to true volcanic activity is obtained by the SACS system.
33 pags., 23 figs., 5 tabs. ; The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument(TROPOMI), launched in October 2017 on board the Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite, monitors the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at an unprecedented horizontal resolution as fine as 3.5×5.5 km2. This paper assesses the performances of the TROPOMI formaldehyde(HCHO) operational product compared to its predecessor, the OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) HCHO QA4ECV product, at different spatial and temporal scales. The parallel development of the two algorithms favoured the consistency of the products, which facilitates the production of long-term combined time series. The main difference between the two satellite products is related to the use of different cloud algorithms, leading to a positive bias of OMI compared to TROPOMI of up to 30% in tropical regions. We show that after switching off the explicit correction for cloud effects, the two datasets come into an excellent agreement. For medium to large HCHO vertical columns(larger than 5×1015 molec. cm-2) the median bias between OMI and TROPOMI HCHO columns is not larger than 10% (<0.4×1015 molec. cm-2). For lower columns, OMI observations present a remaining positive bias of about 20% (<0.8×1015 molec. cm-2) compared to TROPOMI in midlatitude regions. Here, we also use a global network of 18 MAX-DOAS (multi-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy) instruments to validate both satellite sensors for a large range of HCHO columns. This work complements the study by Vigouroux et al. (2020), where a global FTIR(Fourier transform infrared) network is used to validate the TROPOMI HCHO operational product. Consistent with the FTIR validation study, we find that for elevated HCHO columns, TROPOMI data are systematically low (-25% for HCHO columns larger than 8 × 1015 molec. cm-2), while no significant bias is found for medium-range column values. We further show that OMI and TROPOMI data present equivalent biases for large HCHO levels. However, TROPOMI significantly improves the precision of the HCHO observations at short temporal scales and for low HCHO columns. We show that compared to OMI, the precision of the TROPOMI HCHO columns is improved by 25% for individual pixels and by up to a factor of 3 when considering daily averages in 20 km radius circles. The validation precision obtained with daily TROPOMI observations is comparable to the one obtained with monthly OMI observations. To illustrate the improved performances of TROPOMI in capturing weak HCHO signals, we present clear detection of HCHO column enhancements related to shipping emissions in the Indian Ocean. This is achieved by averaging data over a much shorter period (3 months) than required with previous sensors (5 years) and opens new perspectives to study shipping emissions of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and related atmospheric chemical interactions. ; Part of the reported work was carried out in the framework of the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor Mission Performance Centre (S5p MPC), contracted by the European Space Agency (ESA/ESRIN, contract no. 4000117151/16/I-LG) and supported by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO), the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB) and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). BIRA-IASB acknowledges national funding from BELSPO and ESA through the ProDEx projects TRACE-S5P (TRACE-S5P project) and TROVA. Part of this work was also carried out in the framework of the S5p Validation Team (S5PVT) AO projects NIDFORVAL (ID no. 28607, PI Gaia Pinardi, Corinne Vigouroux, BIRA-IASB). Multi-sensor HCHO developments have been funded by the EU FP7 QA4ECV project (grant no. 607405), in close cooperation with KNMI, University of Bremen, MPIC-Mainz and WUR. Work by Hitoshi Irie was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF20192001 and JPMEERF20215005) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan, JSPS KAKENHI (grant numbers JP19H04235 and JP20H04320) and the JAXA 2nd Research Announcement on the Earth Observations (grant number 19RT000351).
30 pags., 13 figs., 4 tabs. ; We present the inter-comparison of delta slant column densities (SCDs) and vertical profiles of nitrous acid (HONO) derived from measurements of different multiaxis differential optical absorption spectroscopy (MAXDOAS) instruments and using different inversion algorithms during the Second Cabauw Inter-comparison campaign for Nitrogen Dioxide measuring Instruments (CINDI- 2) in September 2016 at Cabauw, the Netherlands (51.97° N, 4.93° E). The HONO vertical profiles, vertical column densities (VCDs), and near-surface volume mixing ratios are compared between different MAX-DOAS instruments and profile inversion algorithms for the first time. Systematic and random discrepancies of the HONO results are derived from the comparisons of all data sets against their median values. Systematic discrepancies of HONO delta SCDs are observed in the range of ±0:3×1015 molec. cm2, which is half of the typical random discrepancy of 0:6× 1015 molec. cm2. For a typical high HONO delta SCD of 2×1015 molec. cm2, the relative systematic and random discrepancies are about 15% and 30 %, respectively. The inter-comparison of HONO profiles shows that both systematic and random discrepancies of HONO VCDs and nearsurface volume mixing ratios (VMRs) are mostly in the range of ∼ ±0:5×1014 molec. cm2 and ∼ ±0:1 ppb (typically ∼ 20 %). Further we find that the discrepancies of the retrieved HONO profiles are dominated by discrepancies of the HONO delta SCDs. The profile retrievals only contribute to the discrepancies of the HONO profiles by ∼ 5 %. However, some data sets with substantially larger discrepancies than the typical values indicate that inappropriate implementations of profile inversion algorithms and configurations of radiative transfer models in the profile retrievals can also be an important uncertainty source. In addition, estimations of measurement uncertainties of HONO dSCDs, which can significantly impact profile retrievals using the optimal estimation method, need to consider not only DOAS fit errors, but also atmospheric variability, especially for an instrument with a DOAS fit error lower than ∼ 3×1014 molec. cm2. The MAX-DOAS results during the CINDI-2 campaign indicate that the peak HONO levels (e.g. near-surface VMRs of ∼ 0:4 ppb) often appeared in the early morning and below 0.2 km. The near-surface VMRs retrieved from the MAXDOAS observations are compared with those measured using a co-located long-path DOAS instrument. The systematic differences are smaller than 0.15 and 0.07 ppb during early morning and around noon, respectively. Since true HONO values at high altitudes are not known in the absence of real measurements, in order to evaluate the abilities of profile inversion algorithms to respond to different HONO profile shapes, we performed sensitivity studies using synthetic HONO delta SCDs simulated by a radiative transfer model with assumed HONO profiles. The tests indicate that the profile inversion algorithms based on the optimal estimation method with proper configurations can reproduce the different HONO profile shapes well. Therefore we conclude that the features of HONO accumulated near the surface derived from MAX-DOAS measurements. ; Funding for this study was provided by ESA through the CINDI-2 (ESA contract no. 4000118533/16/I-Sbo) and FRM4DOAS (ESA contract no. 4000118181/16/I-EF) projects, by the NSFC (grant no. 41805027), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant no. 18-35-00682), the Russian Academy of Sciences (grant nos. 0150-2018-0052 and 0129-2019- 0002), NASA's Atmospheric Composition Program (grant no. NASA-16-NUP2016-0001), the US National Science Foundation (AGS-1620530 award), and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the ACTRIS-2 transnational access programme (grant no. 654109). The AIOFM group is grateful for the support by the NSFC (grant no. 41530644). The article processing charges for this open-access publication were covered by the Max Planck Society
