Measurement of low-altitude CO over the Indian subcontinent by MOPITT

International audienceWe show that the dayside MOPITT retrievals in the lower troposphere can provide useful information on surface sources of atmospheric CO over the Indian subcontinent. We find that MOPITT retrievals at 850 hPa show localized enhancements over the Indian subcontinent, which correlate with similar enhancements seen in the tropospheric NO2 columns from the SCIAMACHY instrument. In particular, high concentrations of CO over the Indo-Gangetic basin and some prominent cities are captured in the lower-tropospheric retrievals in spring. MOPITT averaging kernels (normalized to take into account the absorber amounts in the layers) indicate that the retrievals are sensitive to CO in the lower troposphere. In winter, MOPITT retrievals at 850 hPa can detect the strongest source areas over the eastern states of Bihar and West Bengal, thus confirming the so-called “Bihar pollution pool,” which was detected earlier in the aerosol measurements by the multiangle imaging spectroradiometer (MISR) aboard Terra. The pollution features are consistent with the spatial distribution of CO emissions in India, as reflected in the GEOS-Chem simulation of CO. Furthermore, these lower-tropospheric features in the simulation are still present after smoothing the modeled fields using the MOPITT averaging kernels and a priori profile, demonstrating that the retrievals do have sensitivity in the lower troposphere. This work indicates that although MOPITT retrievals are often most sensitive to CO in the middle and upper troposphere, they do provide information on lower-tropospheric CO in selected continental regions with strong thermal contrast and could be useful for pollution studies