On the determination of atmospheric minor gases by the method of vanishing partial derivatives with application to CO₂

We present a general method for the determination of minor gases in the troposphere from high spectral resolution observations. In this method, we make use of a general property of the total differential of multi‐variable functions to separate the contributions of each individual minor gas. We have applied this method to derive the mixing ratio of carbon dioxide in the mid‐troposphere using data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) currently flying on the NASA Aqua Mission. We compare our results to the aircraft flask CO 2 measurements obtained by H. Matsueda et al. over the western Pacific and demonstrate skill in tracking the measured 5 ppmv seasonal variation with an accuracy of 0.43 ± 1.20 ppmv.