NO2 Retrieval from the Environmental Trace Gases Monitoring Instrument (EMI): Preliminary Results and Intercomparison with OMI and TROPOMI

Onboard the Chinese GaoFen-5 (GF5) satellite, the Environmental trace gases Monitoring Instrument (EMI) is a nadir-viewing wide-field spectrometer that was launched on May 9, 2018. EMI measures the back-scattered earthshine solar radiance in the ultraviolet and visible spectral range. By using the differential optical absorption spectrometry (DOAS) method and the EMI measurements in the VIS1 band (405–465 nm), we performed retrievals of NO2. Some first retrieval results of NO2 from EMI and a comparison with OMI and TROPOMI products are presented in this paper. The monthly mean total vertical column densities (VCD) of NO2 show similar spatial distributions to OMI and TROPOMI (r > 0.88) and their difference is less than 27%. A comparison of the daily total VCD shows that EMI could detect the NO2 patterns in good agreement with OMI (r = 0.93) and TROPOMI (r = 0.95). However, the slant column density (SCD) uncertainty (0.79 × 1015 molec cm−2) of the current EMI algorithm is relatively larger than OMI. The daily variation pattern of NO2 from EMI in Beijing in January 2019 is consistent with TROPOMI (r = 0.96). The spatial distribution correlation of the tropospheric NO2 VCD of EMI with OMI and TROPOMI is 0.88 and 0.89, respectively, but shows an overestimate compared to OMI (15%) and TROPOMI (23%), respectively. This study demonstrates the capability of using EMI for global NO2 monitoring