Improvements in aerosol layer height retrievals from TROPOMI oxygen A-band measurements by surface albedo fitting in optimal estimation

The aerosol layer height (ALH), from the Sentinel5P/TROPOMI L2_AER_LH product, is based on an optimal estimation (OE) approach, fitting cloud-free measurements to synthetic reflectances in the strongest oxygen absorption band, provided by a neural network trained with high-resolution simulated reflectances. The ALH has been continuously improved since its release in 2019, focusing especially on (bright) land surfaces, over which the ALH product showed underestimated ALHs (biased towards the surface). This paper describes the latest updates of the ALH product, which includes first the introduction of the directional Lambertian-equivalent reflectance (DLER) climatology to improve the surface albedo characterization over land. Second, the paper describes a further improvement, adding the surface albedo in the feature vector of the OE inversion, using the DLER as prior information. Using this approach, the retrievals over land largely match the retrievals over ocean, which have shown a good comparison with validation data since its release, most notably with Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) weighted extinction heights. The albedo is fitted for both land and ocean surfaces, but the implementation is different over land and ocean because of the large range of land surface albedos. Over land, the a priori surface albedo values are relaxed so the fitting procedure can incorporate the albedo effects in the retrieval over land. Over ocean, the retrievals are optimized by tuning the a priori error settings. The current implementation improves retrievals over land with approximately 1.5 times more converged results and decreases land–ocean contrasts in the ALH retrievals. The average difference between CALIOP weighted extinction height decreased for selected cases from approximately − 1.9 to −0.9 km over land and from approximately −0.8 to +0.1 km over ocean. An independent verification with ATmospheric LIDar (ATLID) data from EarthCARE showed consistent behaviour between the new operational data and the test cases.