Initial results of the ozone profile algorithm developed for the Ozone Monitoring Instrument

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on board of Aura, launched in mid 2004, provides many useful products for atmospheric scientists, such as the total columns of ozone, NO2, SO2, BrO, HCHO, and aerosol and cloud properties. Due to its use of a CCD OMI has a high spatial resolution combined with near global coverage each day. A new product, namely the ozone profile derived from backscattered UV radiation, will shortly be released. The retrieval algorithm is based on optimal estimation with climatological a-priori information. Like algorithms that have been developed for GOME, it uses scalar forward radiative transfer and corrections for the polarized nature of scattered light. New elements of the algorithm are rotational Raman scattering and several procedures to enhance the efficiency of the calculations. in this presentation some details of the algorithm will be discussed and initial results of the algorithm applied to OMI data will be shown. In addition, comparisons made with results obtained with other instruments (e.g. sondes and MLS on board of Aura) will be presented.