Review on the applications of Tropospheric Emissions Spectrometer to air-quality research: Perspectives for China

The Tropospheric Emissions Spectrometer (TES) aboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Aura satellite launched in July 2004 is the first satellite instrument to provide simultaneous retrievals of ozone (O3) and carbon monoxide (CO) throughout the Earth’s lower atmosphere. This paper briefly reviews the TES instrument, the retrieval of O3 and CO profiles, and the validation of the retrievals. The applications of TES O3 and CO products include mapping the vertical and horizontal distribution of tropospheric O3 and CO and their correlations, examining the regional and continental outflow, and analyzing the variability of the two species associated with certain weather and climatic conditions, such as El Niño and the Asian monsoon. TES retrievals of O3 and CO offer an important new source of satellite data over China with good spatial and temporal coverage that can provide evaluation and constraints on the performance of chemical transport models in simulating the general features of ozone pollution over China. Special observations have been conducted and requests may be submitted to the TES team to make geographically focused observations of O3 and CO over China.