Mapping the CO2 total column retrieval performance from shortwave infrared measurements: synthetic impacts of the spectral resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and spectral band selection

Abstract. Satellites have been providing spaceborne observations of the total column of CO2 (denoted XCO2) for over two decades now, and, with the need for independent verification of Paris Agreement objectives, many new satellite concepts are currently planned or being studied to complement or extend the instruments that already exist. Depending on whether they are targeting natural and/or anthropogenic fluxes of CO2, the designs of these future concepts vary greatly. The characteristics of their shortwave infrared (SWIR) observations notably explore several orders of magnitude in spectral resolution (from λ/Δλ ∼ 400 for Carbon Mapper to λ/Δλ ∼ 25 000 for MicroCarb) and include different selections of spectral bands (from one to four bands, among which there are the CO2-sensitive 1.6 µm and/or 2.05 µm bands). The very nature of the spaceborne measurements is also explored: for instance, the NanoCarb imaging concept proposes to measure CO2-sensitive truncated interferograms, instead of infrared spectra like other concepts, in order to significantly reduce the instrument size. This study synthetically explores the impact of three different design parameters on the XCO2 retrieval performance obtained through optimal estimation: (1) the spectral resolution, (2) the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and (3) the spectral band selection. Similar performance assessments are completed for the exactly defined OCO-2, MicroCarb, Copernicus CO2 Monitoring (CO2M) and NanoCarb concepts. We show that improving the SNR is more efficient than improving the spectral resolution to increase XCO2 precision when perturbing these parameters across 2 orders of magnitude, and we find that a low SNR and/or a low spectral resolution yield XCO2 with vertical sensitivities that give more weight to atmospheric layers close to the surface. The exploration of various spectral band combinations illustrates, especially for lower spectral resolutions, how including an O2-sensitive band helps to increase the optical path length information and how the 2.05 µm CO2-sensitive band contains more geophysical information than the 1.6 µm band. With very different characteristics, MicroCarb shows a CO2 information content that is only slightly higher than that of CO2M, which translates into XCO2 random errors that are lower by a factor ranging from 1.1 to 1.9, depending on the observational situation. The performance of NanoCarb for a single pixel of its imager is comparable to those of concepts that measure spectra at low SNR and low spectral resolution, but, as this novel concept would observe a given target several times during a single overpass, its performance improves when combining all the observations. Overall, the broad range of results obtained through this synthetic XCO2 performance mapping hint at the future intercomparison challenges that the wide variety of upcoming CO2-observing concepts will pose.