New version of Metop PMAp product released soon

A new version of the Polar Multi-sensor Aerosol optical properties product, PMAp, will be released on 6 May 2021.

Last Updated

22 September 2021

Published on

22 April 2021

The new version of PMAp, Version 2.2.4, essentially brings the following enhancements:

Details of the changes in V2.2.4 compared to the previous version V2.1 are listed below:

A dust detection scheme has been added in the PMAp pre-classification step exploiting IASI measurements, this dust detection is now provided as an aerosol class in the output.
To solve 'hotspot' issue in retrieved AOD (resulting from clouds misidentified as aerosol), cloud filtering is revisited in the algorithm flowchart and led to an improved detection of aerosol contaminated clouds besides upgrade of flags e.g. Aerosol contaminated cloud, volcanic ash contaminated cloud.
Over land surfaces, the use of a surface reflectance database (namely Minimum LER angular database) has been updated to v.3.0 to be compatible with the database derived from both Metop-A and Metop-B. An additional angular dependency of LER has been also implemented.
To account for the aging of the sensor, a degradation correction procedure for GOME2 PMD Level 1b data has been integrated for Metop-A, B and C. These degradation correction coefficients have been updated to be in line with the latest version derived from re-processed GOME-2 L1b data.
The need for an additional radiometric adjustment of GOME-2 PMD-P radiances was identified. A methodology has been developed to derive the needed correction for Metop-A, B and C (affecting bands used for land retrieval).
As a result of all above mentioned updates, the differences between AOD retrieved from Metop-A, B and C have been reduced to have a consistent AOD product from all platforms.

PMAp over Ocean has operational status, while PMAp over Land currently has Demonstration status.

A test data time series reprocessed with the new v2.2.4 is available on our SFTP server: