European Campaign Activities in 2019 for Calibration and Validation of the S-5p Operational Products

Launched on 13 October 2017, Sentinel 5 Precursor (S-5p) is the first mission of the Copernicus Programme dedicated to the monitoring of air quality, climate, ozone and UV radiation. The much finer spatial resolution of S-5p introduces many new opportunities and challenges, requiring to carefully assess the quality and validity of the generated data products by comparison with independent measurements and analyses.

While the routine validation and QA/QC of the S-5p operational products is performed within the ESA Mission Performance Center (MPC) based on a limited number of Fiducial Reference Measurements (FRM), additional validation activities including field campaigns are conducted in research mode as part of the S-5p Validation Team (S5PVT).

Here, we present a series of campaign activities planned to take place in 2019. These have been identified to address key priorities for validation of S5-p operational products and are subject of the S-5p Campaign Implementation Plan (CIP).

A first set of activities concentrates on the main S-5p UV-Vis tropospheric products (NO₂, HCHO and SO₂₎. Airborne deployment, including both in-situ spiral and remote sensing mapping flights, are planned over cities and industrial areas in Romania (Bucharest; Jiu valley), the German Ruhr area (Cologne; Duisburg; Dusseldorf), Belgium (Antwerp (port); Brussels) and The Netherlands (Rotterdam (port); Cabauw). Airborne operations will be complemented with various deployments at the ground (MAX-DOAS, Car-DOAS, sun-photometer, ceilometer, lidar, etc.). NASA will also provide additional instruments, such as an airborne HCHO analyser, several Pandora spectrometers and a TOLNet tropospheric ozone lidar.

A second set of activities focuses on the validation of the SWIR data products (CO and CH₄). COCCON (COllaborative Carbon Column Observing Network) portable low-resolution EM27/SUN FTIR spectrometers will be deployed for an extended period at 15 different sites in order to obtain a good coverage of geophysical parameters and different ground scenes. Additionally, CO and CH₄ columns and vertical profiles will be measured by aircraft, drone- and balloon-based AirCore and FTIR spectrometers at the CESAR super-site of Cabauw (The Netherlands) and super-sites in France (Aire-sur-l'Adour and Trainou).