Articles | Volume 8, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-8-63-2008
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-8-63-2008
10 Jan 2008
 | 10 Jan 2008

Technical Note: Recipe for monitoring of total ozone with a precision of around 1 DU applying mid-infrared solar absorption spectra

M. Schneider and F. Hase

Abstract. Mid-infrared solar absorption spectra recorded by a state-of-the-art ground-based FTIR system have the potential to provide precise total O3 amounts. The currently best-performing retrieval approaches use a combination of small and broad spectral O3 windows between 780 and 1015 cm−1. We show that for these approaches the uncertainties of the temperature profile are by far the major error sources. We demonstrate that a joint optimal estimation of temperature and O3 profiles widely eliminates this error. The improvements are documented by an extensive theoretical error estimation. Our results suggest that mid-infrared FTIR measurements can provide total O3 amounts with a precision of around 1 DU, placing this method among the most precise ground-based O3 monitoring techniques. We recapitulate the requirements on the instrumental hardware and on the retrieval that are needed to achieve this high precision.

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