Assimilation of EPS tropospheric ozone for air quality forecast

This paper describes the objectives, proposed methodology and preliminary results of the EPS-MetOp RAO project 3029, which objective is to evaluate the feasibility of using EPS tropospheric ozone information to constrain the forecast of air quality at European scale: data assimilation methodologies will be applied in view of improving the analysis of ozone concentrations in the boundary layer. The project builds on two main methodological steps. First, a feasibility study is based on twin numerical experiments, and aims to assess the interest of assimilating tropospheric ozone columns and profiles, to be provided by IASI, for analysing boundary layer ozone. Second, experiments will be performed to evaluate the improvement brought by assimilating IASI tropospheric ozone information: these experiments will be conducted using simulated data, obtained from the IASI instrument model, and with real IASI data when available. The project expects to demonstrate the feasibility of assimilating IASI tropospheric ozone measurements for boundary layer ozone analysis.