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A greenhouse gas satellite data assimilation system is currently being developed for the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) - Aerosols and Reactive Trace gases (ART) - Limited Area Mode (LAM) model at the German Weather Service. This work is part of the modelling module of the Integrated Greenhouse Gas Monitoring System project (ITMS-M). A first step towards the satellite data assimilation system is the derivation of vertical columns of methane from ICON-ART-LAM simulations that can be compared to column retrievals of CH4 from satellite sensors such as the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board of the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. As the ICON-ART-LAM simulations are limited to about 20 km altitude, vertical columns cannot directly be derived from the model output alone. In this presentation, the potential of adding CH4 concentrations from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) egg4 greenhouse gas reanalysis and CAMS inversion optimized products above the ICON-ART-LAM upper boundary is evaluated for the time period May-June 2018 and a domain covering Europe (6.5 x 6.5 km2 horizontal grid spacing). The vertical profiles of ICON-ART-LAM are investigated for consistency with the CAMS simulations and ICON-ART-LAM vertical columns derived from the model output will be compared against CH4 vertical columns from TROPOMI. For the latter, the satellite orbit and the sensitivity of the satellite sensor towards retrieving CH4 in different layers of the atmosphere are considered.
Blechschmidt et al. (Fri,) studied this question.