An improved tropospheric NO2 retrieval for OMI observations in the vicinity of mountainous terrain

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 Dutch OMI NO2 product (DOMINO) exhibits 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 NO2 over the Po Valley in Italy and over the Swiss plateau is underestimated by DOMINO by about 15–20% in winter and 5% in summer under clear-sky conditions (cloud radiance fraction