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NO2 satellite retrievals biased by absorption in water

Nature Geoscience (2024)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 20 September 2024

The Original Article was published on 01 June 2023

arising from: Kong et al. Nature Geoscience (2023) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01200-8 (2023)

Localized tropospheric nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2) are mostly formed from emission sources, such as large cities1, mineral mining sites2, busy transportation routes3, fuel delivery infrastructure4 and wildfires5. Kong et al.6 recently reported anomalous tropospheric NO2 columns from spaceborne remote sensing observations of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) over Tibetan Plateau lakes and attributed them to megacity-scale emissions from these lakes. Here we report serious anomalies in the NO2 retrievals over most of these lakes, possibly due to absorption in the water, which may have biased the NO2 retrieval results. Without addressing this potential absorption, it is premature to attribute any anomalies in tropospheric NO2 to emissions from Tibetan lakes, let alone estimate their magnitude.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Data availability

Standard S5P/TROPOMI level-2 NO2 (L2__NO2___) data are freely available via the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/). Detailed analysis data, such as fit residuals, are not available in the regular TROPOMI NO2 data files but are available upon request. Data used for the analysis are available upon request at this stage of the submission. No restriction on data availability applies to the data we used.

Code availability

Codes used for conducting our study are available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

Sentinel-5 Precursor is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission on behalf of the European Commission. The TROPOMI payload is a joint development by ESA and the Netherlands Space Office (NSO). The Sentinel-5 Precursor ground-segment development has been funded by ESA, with national contributions from The Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. The main author thanks S. Victorov for long-term support in his academic career, enabling many scientific contributions, including this study, to be published.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. R&D Satellite and Observations Group, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, the Netherlands

    Lev D. Labzovskii, Jos van Geffen, Mengyao Liu, Ronald van der A, Jos de Laat, Benjamin Leune, Henk Eskes, Xiaojuan Lin & Jieying Ding

  2. Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Andreas Richter

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  1. Lev D. Labzovskii
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  2. Jos van Geffen
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  4. Ronald van der A
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  7. Henk Eskes
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  8. Xiaojuan Lin
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  9. Jieying Ding
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Contributions

L.D.L. developed the conceptual framework and carried out implementation, data analysis, plotting and writing. R.v.d.A. devised the original idea for the manuscript, and contributed to writing, editing and supervising. J.v.G. performed data analysis, writing, editing and plotting. J.d.L. carried out conceptual framework development, writing and editing. M.L. provided methodological support and editing. H.E., X.L. and J.D. carried out editing. B.L. performed sensitivity experimentation. A.R. carried out editing and plotting.

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Correspondence to Lev D. Labzovskii.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Chris McLinden and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Labzovskii, L.D., van Geffen, J., Liu, M. et al. NO2 satellite retrievals biased by absorption in water. Nat. Geosci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01545-8

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