Measuring Sulfur Dioxide From Space: The Promise of Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on EOS-AURA Platform

Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) is a wide field of view hyper-spectral imaging spectrometer to be launched on Earth Observing System's (EOS) AURA platform in 2004. OMI is a contribution of the Netherlands' Agency for Aerospace Programs (NIVR) in collaboration with the Finish Meteorological Institute (FMI) to the EOS Aura mission. The footprint size for OMI at nadir is 13 km x 24 km and it makes observation in one visible (350 - 500 nm) and two UV (UV1: 270 to 314nm and UV2: 306 to 380 nm) bands. The hyper-spectral capability of OMI along with its smaller foot print size, presents us an opportunity to monitor anthropogenic sulfur dioxide from space with better sensitivity (about 0.5 DU) and an attempt to build a satellite based global inventory of these sources. The optimum spectral region for sulfur dioxide retrievals is determined from the differential radiance due to added sulfur dioxide compared with the noise radiance of the instrument. The sulfur dioxide inversion strategy is based on a flexible inversion approach and uses maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper we will present the performance of the OMI sulfur dioxide retrieval algorithm on simulated OMI radiances. Sensitivity of the retrieval on random noise and other systematic error sources will also be discussed.