A Decade of Observations of Carbon Monoxide from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere Instrument (MOPITT) on TERRA

The Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument was launched on the Terra satellite in 1999. It now provides an unprecedented decadal record of carbon monoxide (CO) from space. This important tropospheric trace gas is an excellent indicator of combustion processes, both from anthropogenic urban regions and biomass burning, and serves as a proxy for the study of pollutant transport around the globe. The MOPITT mission has improved our understanding of the processes determining the seasonal variability of CO and highlighted the importance of wildfires and biomass burning in driving inter-annual variability. Through new retrieval capability, MOPITT is also the first sensor for which instantaneous multispectral measurements have been utilized to map out pollution concentrations in the lowermost atmosphere.