Metrology of ground-based satellite validation: co-location mismatch and smoothing issues of total ozone comparisons
Comparisons between satellite and ground-based measurements of the atmosphere are inevitably affected by natural variability due to mismatches in spatial and temporal co-location. These additional terms in the comparison error budget are quantified here for total ozone column comparisons using an Observing System Simulation Experiment. Even when using tight co-location criteria, atmospheric variability is found to impact the comparisons significantly. ; Part of this work was funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and ESA via the ProDEx projects A3C and ACROSAT, and by the EU H2020 project GAIA-CLIM (Ares(2014)3708963/Project 640276). The authors acknowledge the pioneering research carried out in 2008–2012 by C. De Clercq and S. Vandenbussche and funded by the EU FP6 project GEOmon (FP6-2005-Global-4-036677) and ProDEx project SECPEA.