Remote Sensing of Greenhouse Gases and Their Sources and Sinks

The man-made emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) are considered the main drivers of anthropogenically induced climate change. Major uncertainties persist when it comes to quantifying regional scale surface fluxes of these gases or predicting the evolution of the relevant source/sink processes in a changing climate. Remote sensing of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from space-borne and ground-based platforms offers the opportunity to significantly advance our knowledge on spatial and temporal scales that are suitable for process attribution and mitigation actions. Overall, the most promising remote-sensing strategy exploits the rotational-vibrational absorption of CO₂ and CH₄ in sunlight penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere. Typically, satellite sounders such as GOSAT (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory), and S5P (Sentinel-5 precursor) as well as the ground-based spectrometers of the TCCON (Total Carbon Column Observing Network) cover various CO₂, CH₄, and O₂ absorption bands in the near and shortwave infrared spectral range between 0.75 micron (13400cm⁻¹) and 2.5 micron (4000cm⁻¹). Accuracy of the inferred gas concentrations is contingent on the accuracy of the adopted spectroscopic parameters and spectroscopic models available in these spectral regions. Here, I will report on recent achievements and challenges within our greenhouse-gas remote-sensing activities mainly focusing on the GOSAT observational record. Since its launch in early 2009, the Fourier Transform Spectrometer onboard GOSAT delivers solar absorption spectra with good spectral resolution and high signal-to-noise. It has been shown that the CO₂ and CH₄ retrievals from these observations can achieve an accuracy on the order of fractions of a percent which makes them suitable for tracking regional scale source/sink processes and their response to climate events. In order to achieve the required accuracy, it is crucial to develop highly accurate radiative-transfer algorithms and to validate the satellite soundings by ground-based observations. I will illustrate some cases where the excellent quality of the absorption spectra collected by GOSAT reveals spectroscopic deficiencies and inconsistencies among the various absorption bands covered. As such, lessons learned from GOSAT can be used as a feedback to the spectroscopy community. Beyond GOSAT, future satellite missions such as S5P or the planned S5 (Sentinel-5, launch ∼2020) will cover spectral ranges which have not yet been spectroscopically optimized for remote-sensing purposes. In that case, simulations and studies based on ground-based observations show that spectroscopic uncertainties constitute a dominant contribution to the error budget of the retrieved gas concentrations. Therefore, further improvements of spectroscopic parameters and line-shape models is of paramount interest for remote sensing of greenhouse gases.