Sulfur dioxide from volcanoes and pollution (Suomi-NPP)

The OMPS_NPP_NMSO2_PCA_L2 product is part of the MEaSUREs (Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments) suite of products. It is retrieved from the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Nadir Mapper (NM) spectrometer and provides contiguous daily global monitoring of anthropogenic and volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO2), an important pollutant and aerosol precursor that affects both air quality and the climate. The product is based on the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center principal component analysis (PCA) spectral fitting algorithm (Li et al., 2013, 2017), and continues (Zhang et al., 2017) NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) standard Aura/Ozone Monitoring Instrument SO2 product (OMSO2). The latest OMPS_NPP_NMSO2_PCA_L2 V2 product uses new Jacobian lookup tables and more realistic model based a priori profiles in anthropogenic SO2 retrievals. This helps to more accurately account for the pixel-to-pixel variation in SO2 sensitivity due to different factors such as the vertical distribution of SO2, solar and viewing angles, surface reflectivity, and cloudiness. As compared with the previous OMPS_NPP_NMSO2_PCA_L2 V1.2 product that assumes the same SO2 sensitivity for all OMPS pixels, the new V2 anthropogenic SO2 retrievals have reduced retrieval biases especially over background regions (see Figure 1 for an example). The same updated PCA SO2 retrieval algorithm (Li et al., 2020) is also used to produce the recently released OMSO2 V2 product (doi:10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA2022). The new OMPS_NPP_NMSO2_PCA_L2 V2 product thus offers enhanced consistency between the NASA EOS standard (OMI) and continuity (OMPS) SO2 data records Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) is a short-lived gas primarily produced by volcanoes, power plants, refineries, metal smelting and burning of fossil fuels. Where SO2 remains near the Earth's surface, it is toxic, causes acid rain, and degrades air quality. Where SO2 is lofted into the free troposphere, it forms aerosols that can alter cloud reflectivity and precipitation. In the stratosphere, volcanic SO2 forms sulfate aerosols that can result in climate change.