The european copernicus anthropogenic co2 monitoring mission

As part of the European Copernicus Programme, the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) together with the support of Eumetsat and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are considering to develop the first constellation of operational satellites for measurements of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The observing system shall provide a 3-day revisit over mid-latitudes at 4 km(2) spatial resolution and a precision better than 0.7 ppm in XCO2. The demanding requirements call for a payload comprising multiple instruments, which perform simultaneous measurements of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over the same area to serve as a tracer for plumes of high CO2 concentration, as well as aerosols (and clouds) to reduce XCO2 bias error and significantly increase the yield of useful retrievals. The presentation will introduce the different payload components and observation requirements of the candidate CO2 monitoring Copernicus mission.