A global perspective on CO2 satellite observations in high AOD conditions

Abstract. Satellite-based observations of carbon dioxide (CO2) are sensitive to all processes that affect the propagation of radiation in the atmosphere, including scattering and absorption by atmospheric aerosols. Therefore, accurate retrievals of column-averaged CO2 (XCO2) benefit from detailed information on the aerosol conditions. This is particularly relevant for future missions focusing on observing anthropogenic CO2 emissions, such as the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring mission (CO2M). To fully prepare for CO2M observations, it is informative to investigate existing observations in addition to other approaches. Our focus here is on observations from the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory -2 (OCO-2) mission. In the operational full-physics XCO2 retrieval used to generate OCO-2 level 2 products, the aerosol properties are known to have high uncertainty but their main objective is to facilitate CO2 retrievals. We evaluate the OCO-2 product from the point of view of aerosols by comparing the OCO-2 retrieved aerosol properties to collocated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) Aqua Dark Target aerosol products. We find that there is a systematic difference between the aerosol optical depth (AOD, τ) values retrieved by the two instruments, such that τOCO−2 ∼ 0.4τMODIS. We also find a dependence of the XCO2 on the AOD difference, indicating an aerosol-induced effect in the XCO2 retrieval. In addition, we find a weak but statistically significant correlation between MODIS AOD and XCO2, which can be partly explained by natural covariance and co-emission of aerosols and CO2 but is partly masked by the aerosol-induced XCO2 bias. Furthermore, we find that issues in the OCO-2 aerosol retrieval may lead to misclassification of the quality flag for a small fraction of OCO-2 retrievals. Based on MODIS data, 4.1 % of low AOD cases are incorrectly classified as high AOD (low quality) pixels, while 16.5 % of high AOD cases are erroneously classified as low AOD (high quality) pixels. Finally, we investigate the effect of an AOD threshold on the fraction of acceptable XCO2 data. We find that relaxing the MODIS AOD threshold from 0.2 to 0.5 (at 550 nm), which is the goal for the CO2M, increases the fraction of acceptable data by 14 percentage points globally, and by 31 percentage points for urban areas.