The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME): Mission Concept and First Scientific Results

Abstract

. The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) is a new instrument aboard ESA's 2nd European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS2) , which was launched in April 1995. The main scientific objective of the GOME mission is to determine the global distribution of ozone and several other trace gases, which play an important role in the ozone chemistry of the Earth's stratosphere and troposphere. GOME measures the sunlight scattered from the Earth's atmosphere and/or reflected by the surface in nadir viewing mode in the spectral region 240-790 nm at a moderate spectral resolution of between 0.2nm and 0.4nm. Using the maximum 960 km across-track swath width, the spatial resolution of a GOME ground pixel is 40\\Theta320 km 2 for the majority of the orbit and global coverage is achieved in three days after 43 orbits. Operational data products of GOME as generated by DFD/DLR, the German Data Processing and Archiving Facility (D-PAF) for GOME, comprise absolute radiometrically calibrated earthshine r...