TCCON Nicosia: A New Validation Site for Space Based Observations – 1 Year Update
As of August 31st 2019, TCCON Nicosia has been added to the OCO-2/OCO-3 target sites for the validation of their mission. An example of a target observation can be seen in Figure 1. The comparison of OCO-2 with TCCON shows if the former’s retrievals are biased against the ground based reference network.
Figure 1: OCO-2 target observation on 14/04/2020 (Credit: Matthäus Kiel, Greg Osterman; JPL NASA)
The location of the site is ideal for solar absorption measurements, as Cyprus has mostly sunny days and many hours of sunlight! This supports high data coverage and plenty of validation target opportunities (Figure 2).
Figure 2: One year of TCCON data in Cyprus and validation targets.
In June 2020, the first Cyprus AirCore campaign took place and the results from these observations can be used for the validation and calibration of TCCON Nicosia (Figure 3).
Figure 3: First AirCore campaign in Cyprus and preliminary comparison with TCCON observations.
In July 2020, a PREDE sky radiometer from the National Institute of Environmental Studies (NIES, Japan) was installed for Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) measurements (Figure 4); hence the support of GOSAT and OCO missions’ validation.
Figure 4: The PREDE sky radiometer from NIES, Japan