The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment: Review of in-flight performance and new reprocessed 1995-2011 level 1 product

The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) on-board the second European Remote Sensing satellite provided measurements of atmospheric constituents such as ozone or other trace gases for the 16 year period from 1995 to 2011. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of the long-term performance of the sensor and introduce the new homogenized and fully calibrated level 1 product which has been generated using the recently developed GOME Data Processor level-0-to-1b (GDP-L1) Version 5.1. By means of the various in-flight calibration parameters we monitor the behavior and stability of the instrument during the entire mission. Severe degradation of the optical components has led to a significant decrease in intensity in particular in channels 1 and 2 covering the spectral ranges of 240–316 nm and 311–405 nm, respectively. Thus, a soft correction based on using the sun as a stable calibration source is applied. Revision and optimization of other calibration algorithms such as the wavelength assignment, polarization correction, or dark current correction resulted in an improved and homogeneous level 1 product that can be regarded as the European satellite reference data for successor atmospheric composition sensors and that provides an excellent prerequisite for further exploitation of GOME measurements