Total Ozone from NOAA Satellites—A Physical Model for Obtaining Measurements with High Spatial Resolution

A physical model is presented for calculating the total ozone amount from HIRS radiance measurements from TIROS-N/NOAA satellites. Simulations and retrievals indicate that the total ozone amount can be retrieved with an accuracy better than 5%. Comparisons are presented of analyses of real data physical ozone retrievals from HIRS observations with analyses of regression ozone retrievals from HIRS observations obtained operationally by NOAA/NESDIS, and with analyses of ozone measurements from the Nimbus-G satellite by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer(TOMS). Comparisons of these analyses show that small scale ozone features not resolved by operational regression retrievals are resolved quite well by the higher spatial resolution HIRS retrievals using the physical algorithm.