seasonal and spatial variability

Abstract. We present a detailed description of the TES methanol (CH3OH) retrieval algorithm, along with initial global results showing the seasonal and spatial distribution of methanol in the lower troposphere. The full development of the TES methanol retrieval is described, including microwin-dow selection, error analysis, and the utilization of a priori and initial guess information provided by the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model. Retrieval simulations and a sen-sitivity analysis using the developed retrieval strategy show that TES: (i) generally provides less than 1.0 piece of infor-mation, (ii) is sensitive in the lower troposphere with peak sensitivity typically occurring between ∼900–700 hPa (∼1– 3 km) at a vertical resolution of ∼5 km, (iii) has a limit of detectability between 0.5 and 1.0 ppbv Representative Vol-ume Mixing Ratio (RVMR) depending on the atmospheri