Validation of operational ozone profiles from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument

[1] In this paper we present the validation results of the operational vertical ozone profiles retrieved from the nadir observations by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura platform. The operational ozone profile retrieval algorithm was developed at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the OMI mission data has been processed and made publicly available. Advantages of these nadir sounded ozone profiles are the excellent spatial resolution at nadir and daily global coverage while the vertical resolution is limited to 6–7 km. Comparisons with well‐validated ozone profile recordings by the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), both aboard the NASA EOS‐Aura platform, provide an excellent opportunity for validation because of the large amount of collocations with OMI due to the instruments significant geographical overlap. In addition, comparisons with collocated ozone profiles from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE‐II), the Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE), the Global Ozone Monitoring by the Occultation of Stars (GOMOS) and the Optical Spectrograph and Infrared Imager System (OSIRIS) satellite instruments and balloon‐borne electrochemical concentration cell (ECC) ozonesondes are presented. OMI stratospheric ozone profiles are found to agree within 20% with global correlative data except for both the polar regions during local spring. For ozone in the troposphere OMI shows a systematic positive bias versus the correlative data sets of order 60% in the tropics and 30% at midlatitude regions. The largest source of error in the tropospheric ozone profile is the fit to spectral stray light in the operational algorithm.