Two-Year Comparison of Airborne Measurements of CO2 and CH4 With GOSAT at Railroad Valley, Nevada

The Alpha Jet Atmospheric eXperiment (AJAX) is a project to measure the atmospheric profiles of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and ozone (O
₃
) regularly over California and Nevada. Airborne instruments measuring GHGs and O
₃
are installed in a wing pod of an Alpha Jet aircraft and operated from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, CA. The instruments yield precise and accurate in situ vertical profiles of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO
₂
), methane (CH
₄
), and O
₃
. Measurements of vertical profiles of GHGs and O
₃
over Railroad Valley, NV have been conducted directly under the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) over passes on a monthly basis as part of the AJAX project since June 2011. The purpose of this work is to calculate aircraft-based dry-air mole fractions of the GHGs for the validation of GOSAT data products. This study expands and improves our previous comparisons by evaluating three algorithms against 24 months of in situ data collected over a Gain-M target. We used three different algorithms: Atmospheric CO
₂
Observations from Space (ACOS v3.4r3), Remote Sensing of Greenhouse Gases for Carbon Cycle Modeling (RemoteC v2.3.5FP), and National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES v2.11). We find that the CO
₂
average differences of ACOS and RemoteC from AJAX are 0.26% and 0.24%, respectively. The difference between NIES and AJAX is 0.96%, which is higher than that of ACOS and RemoteC. The CH
₄
average differences for RemoteC and NIES are 2.1% and 1.7%, respectively.