Improvement of the global surface emissivity from MOPITT measurements and its impacts on the retrievals of tropospheric carbon monoxide profiles

Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important tropospheric trace species and can serve as a useful tracer of atmospheric transport. The Measurements of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument uses the 4.7 μm CO band to measure the spatial and temporal variation of the CO profile and total column amount in the troposphere from space. Launched in 1999 on board the NASA Terra satellite, the MOPITT views the earth with a pixel size 22 km by 22 km and a cross-track swath that measures a near-global dictribution of CO every 3 days. In the operational MOPITT CO retrieval algorithm (V3; Version 3), surface skin temperature (Ts) and emissivity (E) are retrieved simultaneously with the CO profile. The accuracy of E and Ts is crucial for obtaining the CO retrieval within the 10% accuracy from the MOPITT measurements. However, because both Ts and E are retrieved from the same piece of information from the MOPITT measurements, the accuracy of both valuables may be limited. Extra surface skin temperature information is needed to determine surface emissivity, and vice versa. In this study, we use MODIS Ts within the MOPITT FOVs, in conjunction with those MOPITT signals most sensitive to the background scene, to compute the surface emissivity through an iterative retrieval algorithm. A monthly 1degree grid averaged 4.7 μm surface emissivity map is generated The evaluation of the accuracy of this monthly 1 degree grid averaged 4.7 μm surface emissivity map is presented and its impacts on the retrievals of tropospheric CO profiles from the MOPITT measurements are also discussed.