Atmospheric Measurement Techniques Discussions www.atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net 1867-8610 2 2 2009 10.5194/amtd-2-781-2009 http://www.atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net/2/781/2009/ http://www.atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net/2/781/2009/amtd-2-781-2009.html http://www.atmos-meas-tech-discuss.net/2/781/2009/amtd-2-781-2009.pdf 781 824 2009-03-10 An improved tropospheric NO₂ retrieval for satellite observations in the vicinity of mountainous terrain Y. Zhou D. Brunner dominik.brunner@empa.ch K. F. Boersma R. Dirksen P. Wang Empa, Swiss Federal Lab. for Materials Testing and Research, Dübendorf, Switzerland Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, KNMI, De Bilt, The Netherlands We present an approach to reduce topography-related errors of vertical tropospheric columns (VTC) of NO₂ retrieved from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) in the vicinity of mountainous terrain. This is crucial for reliable estimates of air pollution levels over our particular area of interest, the Alpine region and the adjacent planes, where the operational OMI products exhibit significant biases due to the coarse resolution of surface parameters used in the retrieval. Our approach replaces the coarse-gridded surface pressures by accurate pixel-average values using a high-resolution topography data set, and scales the a priori NO₂ profiles accordingly. NO₂ VTC reprocessed in this way for the period 2006–2007 suggest that the current Dutch OMI NO₂ product (DOMINO) underestimates NO₂ over the Po Valley in Italy and over the Swiss plateau by about 20% in winter and 5% in summer under clear-sky conditions (cloud radiance fraction <0.5). A sensitivity analysis shows that these seasonal differences are mainly due to the different a priori NO₂ profile shapes and solar zenith angles in winter and summer. 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