Upcoming improvements for the Copernicus S5P NO2 products

An update of the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5p) operational ground-processing system is planned during early December 2020. This includes:

• The Copernicus Sentinel-5P nitrogen dioxide (NO2) product data quality will improve due to a change in the configuration of the NO2 data processing (new version 01.04.00). The effect of this change is an overall decrease of the input 'Cloud Pressure' parameter, which causes an increase of the tropospheric NO2 vertical column. This tropospheric NO2 vertical column amount increase is estimated to be in the range of about 25% especially for anthropogenic emissions situations and is in line with independent ground based measurements and model intercomparisons. Time series including data before and after the activation of this new processor version might therefore show a bias in the data set. Hence, users should be very careful when performing trend studies using previous versions and version 01.04.00 (e.g. COVID-19 impact on tropospheric NO2 columns). A full mission reprocessing is foreseen during 2021 to harmonise the NO2 dataset. Sample NO2 products are available for users to download. Please note that these files are test data and therefore some inconsistencies are present between the filenames and the metadata of the products (i.e string 'TEST' and the version number '010400' in the filenames are inconsistent with the info written to the products metadata).
• A bug fix for a problem in the Ozone Tropospheric product (new processor version 02.01.04), that affected only few measurements will be implemented as well.

Detailed information will be provided within the Product Readme File.

Please note that as usual NRT products for data acquired during the downtime period will be not generated. After the successful deployment of the new PDGS version numbers of the first orbit generated with the new version of the CFI both in NRT and OFFL will be provided.