Retrievals of atmospheric CO2 from simulated space-borne measurements of backscattered near-infrared sunlight: accounting for aerosol effects

Retrievals of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from space-borne measurements of backscattered near-infrared sunlight are hampered by aerosol and cirrus cloud scattering effects. We propose a retrieval approach that allows for the retrieval of a few effective aerosol parameters simultaneously with the CO2 total column by parameterizing particle amount, height distribution, and microphysical properties. Two implementations of the proposed method covering different spectral bands are tested for an ensemble of simulated nadir observations for aerosol (and cirrus) loaded scenes over low- and mid-latitudinal land surfaces. The residual aerosol-induced CO2 errors are mostly below 1% up to aerosol optical thickness 0.5. The proposed methods also perform convincing for scenes where cirrus clouds of optical thickness 0.1 overlay the aerosol. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America