Master Thesis
In October 09, 2015 I finished my Master thesis at the Earth Observation Center at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen. The major objective of the thesis was to examine the accuracy of SCIAMACHY carbon monoxide (CO) total columns derived from near infrared nadir radiometric measurements from 2003 – 2012.
For this purpose, an intercomparison of the CO columns estimated from SCIAMACHY measurements with coincident and colocated retrievals provided by ground-based observations is performed.
This study demonstrated that the SCIAMACHY CO total column validation results depend on many aspects such as the calibration of level-1 data, postprocessing of the retrievals (esp. filtering) and the selection of an appropriate sampling areas around the station. Furthermore, the increased deviations of the space-based and ground-based columns in the later years of the mission clearly demonstrate the impact of the degradation of the channel-8 detector.
It turned out that the space-based retrievals agree with the ground-based estimates, particularly in the early years of the mission. It has been found that in most cases monthly mean SCIAMACHY CO total columns agree within the standard deviation compared to the g-b measurements. The results have been discussed and related to findings made by other authors. Finally recommendations for the direction of further analysis have been given.
Below two links are provided - the first points to the full thesis in PDF format and the second to the presentation of the thesis in course of the defensio.