This product displays the Cloud Optical Thickness (COT) around the globe. Clouds play a crucial role in the Earth's climate system and have significant effects on trace gas retrievals. The cloud optical thickness is retrieved from the O2-A band using the ROCINN algorithm.
The TROPOMI instrument aboard the SENTINEL-5P space craft is a nadir-viewing, imaging spectrometer covering wavelength bands between the ultraviolet and the shortwave infra-red. TROPOMI's purpose is to measure atmospheric properties and constituents. It is contributing to monitoring air quality and providing critical information to services and decision makers.
The instrument uses passive remote sensing techniques by measuring the Top Of Atmosphere (TOA) solar radiation reflected by and radiated from the earth and its atmosphere. The four spectrometers of TROPOMI cover the ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS), Near Infra-Red (NIR) and Short Wavelength Infra-Red (SWIR) domains of the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing operational retrieval of the following trace gas constituents: Ozone (O3), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Formaldehyde (HCHO), Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Methane (CH4).
Within the INPULS project, innovative algorithms and processors for the generation of Level 3 and Level 4 products, improved data discovery and access technologies as well as server-side analytics for the users are developed.
Gridded Level 3 cloud optical thickness derived from Metop/GOME observations.
Cloud physical properties (cloud fraction, cloud top height, cloud optical thickness) are derived from GOME/GOME-2 observations using the OCRA (Optical Cloud Recognition Algorithm) and ROCINN (Retrieval of Cloud Information using Neural Networks). For more details please refer to relevant peer-review papers listed on the GOME and GOME-2 documentation pages: https://atmos.eoc.dlr.de/app/docs/
The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) instrument continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric trace gas constituents started with GOME / ERS-2 and SCIAMACHY / Envisat. Three instruments operate on board EUMETSAT's Meteorological Operational satellites MetOp-A, -B, and -C, launched in 2006, 2012, and 2018, respectively. GOME-2 measures a range of atmospheric trace constituents, with the emphasis on global ozone distribution. Furthermore, cloud properties and intensities of ultraviolet radiation are retrieved. These data are crucial for monitoring the atmospheric composition and the detection of pollutants.
DLR generates operational GOME-2 / MetOp products in the framework of EUMETSAT's Satellite Application Facility on Atmospheric Composition Monitoring (AC-SAF).