S5P/TROPOMI: Overview of Status and Plans for the Operational Level 2 Data Products

On 13 October 2017 the European Sentinel 5 Precursor was successfully launched, with on board the TROPOMI (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument). TROPOMI is an imaging spectrometer developed by The Netherlands and ESA for monitoring the atmospheric composition, for air quality climate and ozone layer applications. The launch of TROPOMI marks the start of operational atmospheric composition measurements from space within the European Copernicus programme, the largest Earth observation programme in the world. After one month of instrument checkout, the first light of TROPOMI was received in November 2017. During the commissioning phase the TROPOMI instrument settings were optimized. This included an increase in the spatial sampling from 7x7 to 3.5x7 km2 (across track x along track), for most of the TROPOMI spectral bands. The S5P commissioning phase was completed half a year after launch and on 30 April 2018 the routine operations were started. The first batch of data products was publicly released on 11 July 2018. In early 2019, almost all of the planned operational data products are released. In this presentation an overview will be given of the status of the operational Level 2 products, as well as of the plans for further improvements of the algorithms.