Statistical comparison of night-time NO2 observations in 2003–2006 from GOMOS and MIPAS instruments

GOMOS (Global Ozone Monitoring by Occultation of Stars) and MIPAS (Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding) are remote sensing instruments on board the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite. GOMOS and MIPAS have been designed for observations of stratospheric and mesospheric constituents, including ozone and nitrogen dioxide. Both instruments have a good global coverage of observations and can provide data also from the polar regions. In this paper, we compare night-time NO₂ data from GOMOS with those from MIPAS. We present statistics of selected sets of data spanning from the year 2003 to 2006. The results for low-to-mid latitudes show that the two instruments are in a good agreement in the middle stratosphere, the differences being typically less than 5%. In the upper stratosphere, GOMOS observations generally show 15% higher values than those from MIPAS. The bias is in virtually all cases smaller than the combined systematic error of the measurements, giving great confidence in the GOMOS and MIPAS data quality. The result for high mesospheric NO₂ mixing ratios observed in the polar regions during winter times indicate a good agreement between GOMOS and MIPAS. In the mesosphere, the difference is less than 35% and smaller than the systematic error. Due to the high mesospheric signal, MIPAS sensitivity decreases in the stratosphere which results in larger differences between the two instruments.