Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) on the NASA Terra spacecraft has been measuring the global atmospheric abundance of carbon monoxide (CO) since March 2000. Direct emissions of CO are mainly produced by incomplete combustion from both natural fires and anthropogenic activities, and CO is also produced chemically from methane and volatile organic carbon (VOC) species. Although CO has a negligible contribution to greenhouse gas radiative absorption, it does play an important role in atmospheric chemistry and climate because it is a dominant sink for the hydroxyl radical (OH) and thus affects the lifetime of methane (CH4) and production of tropospheric ozone (O3). Because of these interactions, the IPCC AR6 estimated that anthropogenic emissions of CO have a significant indirect radiative forcing of 0.23 W/m2. The MOPITT record is long enough to detect significant trends in atmospheric pollution and assess changes in emissions due to regulations, agricultural burning, technology improvements to combustion efficiency and increasing wildfires due to a warming climate. We will present an overview of the MOPITT data record, the unique combination of thermal and shortwave infrared radiances and discuss the continuation of the MOPITT record with IASI on MetOP, CrIS on SNPP and JPSS satellites and TROPOMI on Sentinel 5P.
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Worden et al. (2024) studied this question.
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