Validation of SCIAMACHY Ozone Limb Profiles by ASUR

The Airborne Submillimeter Radiometer (ASUR) is a microwave receiver, which has been used for observing stratospheric and mesospheric constituents. ASUR has also been deployed for validating many satellite sensors since 1996. The SCIAMACHY sensor is one of the atmospheric chemistry payloads onboard the ENVISAT satellite. SCIAVALUE is the aircraft campaign performed onboard the DLR Falcon in September 2002 and in February/March 2003 to validate the SCIAMACHY data products. The campaign covered a latitude band from the tropics to the Arctic in two different seasons to enable the validation activities under different atmospheric conditions. Ozone measurements gathered by the ASUR sensor during the campaign are compared with the SCIAMACHY ozone limb profiles. Two SCIAMACHY ozone datasets have been used for the validation, the ESA operational product version 2.1 and the in-house scientific product version 1.6. Both datasets give reasonable agreement at all latitude sections namely, tropics, midlatitudes and the Arctic. The difference between ASUR and SCIAMACHY is about 10-15% in an altitude range of 20-50 km. However, this is within the estimated accuracy of ASUR ozone retrievals. The comparisons indicate that the SCIAMACHY retrievals might have a pointing problem.