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GOME-2
The GOME-2 (Global
Ozone Monitoring Experiment) are a series of three
identical instruments operating from the MetOp platforms. The GOME-2 instrument is a 4 channel UV/Vis
grating spectrometer observing the Earth's atmosphere in nadir viewing geometry.
It covers the wavelength region of 240 - 790 nm at moderate spectral resolution
of 0.2 - 0.4 nm and has a ground-pixel size of 80 x 40 km2 (240 x 40 km2 for the back scan)
over most of the globe. With its large swath, near global
coverage is achieved every day.
The GOME-2 is the successor of GOME but has better spatial resolution, global coverage and is expected to provide data for the next 15 years from three successive instruments. Based on the experience with the GOME instrument, a number of improvements have been implemented that reduce the polarisation dependency of the instrument and problems with the diffuser used for irradiance measurements and facilitate more accurate radiometric calibration.
The first GOME-2 was launched on MetOp into a sun synchronous polar orbit in October 2006, and spectra are available since January 2007. The second MetOp satellite was launched successfully in September 2012 and data from the GOME-2 instrument on that platform will become available in early 2013.
For reasons not yet fully understood, the first GOME-2 instrument suffers from unexpectedly rapid loss in throughput. This leads to increasing scatter of the results and also to drifts in the retrieved amounts of some minor species. Since 2010, throughput loss has slowed down very much and no further deterioration in signal has so far been observed. More details can be found on the following poster:
- Dikty, S, Richter, A.,
Weber, M., Noel, S., Wittrock, F. Bovensmann, H., Munro, R., Lang, R.,
Burrows, J.P., GOME-2
optical degradation as seen in level 2 data time series (2007 - 2010; BrO,
NO2, HCHO, H2O, and O3),
EGU General Assembly, Vienna, Austria,
You can browse through images of GOME-2 data using our data browser. Stratospheric NO2 columns over a large number of validation stations is available here.
There also is a volcanic SO2 alert based on GOME-2 measurements which was developed for the SAVAA project.
More on the instrument and the mission can be found on the EUMETSAT GOME-2 pages and the ESA GOME-2 pages.