Identification of short and long‐lived atmospheric trace gases from IASI space observations

Overview & Synopsis

In recent years, major progress has been made in measuring weakly absorbing atmospheric trace gases from high spectral resolution space observations. In this paper, we apply the so‐called whitening transformation on spectra of the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), and show that it allows removing most of the climatological background from spectra, leaving a residual that contains those spectral signatures that depart from normality. These can subsequently be attributed to changes in the abundance of trace species. This is illustrated for two diverging cases: (1) a biomass burning plume from the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires, leading to the unambiguous identification of nine reactive trace gases, including a first observation of glycolaldehyde; (2) spectra observed a decade apart, from which changes in eight long‐lived halogenated substances are identified; three of them never observed before by a nadir sounder.