Comparison of total ozone column observations from space-borne Ozone Monitoring Instrument with ground-based Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer measurements at an urban location in Indo-Gangetic Basin

ABSTRACT

This article presents a comparison analysis of OMIT (Ozone Monitoring Instrument retrieved overpass total ozone column (TOC)), and DOST (Dobson Ozone Spectrophotometer observed TOC) over Delhi during a period from October 2004 to June 2011. Megacity Delhi, located in Indo-Gangetic Basin, is an important site for comparison of ground-based and satellite retrieved TOCs due to significant anthropogenic emissions of ozone precursors, large shift in seasons, and large-scale crop residue burning in the region. DOST and OMIT data show an overall bias of 3.07% and significant correlation with coefficient of determination R² = 0.73. Large seasonal fluctuations in the biases and correlations have been observed ranging from 2.46% (winter) to 3.82% (spring), and R² = 0.84 (winter) to R² = 0.09 (summer), respectively. The large biases are attributed to changes in temperature, cloud cover, pollutants emissions from urban area, and crop-residue burning events. We also find notable variations in correlations between the datasets due to the varying burden of absorbing aerosols from open field crop-residue burning. The R² has changed from 0.67 (for aerosol optical depth, AOD 1.5–3.5) to 0.77 (for AOD 0–0.99). The dependence of the bias on solar zenith angle, cloud fraction, and satellite distance is also discussed. A simple linear regression analysis is applied to check the linkage between DOST and OMIT. The influence of atmospheric air temperature and relative humidity on OMIT at different pressure levels between 1000 and 20 hPa has been discussed.

Acknowledgments

We greatly acknowledge NASA’s teams for MODIS and OMI data and Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) and India Meteorological Department (www.imd.gov.in) for DOST data provided at http://woudc.org/archive/. We also extend our gratitude to NCEP/DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis-2 team for providing atmospheric temperature and relative humidity data for Delhi. We also thank the editor and anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions to improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.