Use of machine learning and principal component analysis to retrieve nitrogen dioxide (NO2) with hyperspectral imagers and reduce noise in spectral fitting

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is an important trace-gas pollutant and climate agent whose presence also leads to spectral interference in ocean color retrievals. NO2 column densities have been retrieved with satellite UV-Vis spectrometers such as the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) that typically have spectral resolutions of the order of 0.5 nm or better and spatial footprints as small as 3.6 km x 5.6 km. These NO2 observations are used to estimate emissions, monitor pollution trends, and study effects on human health. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to retrieve NO2 amounts with lower-spectral-resolution hyperspectral imagers such as the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) that will fly on the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite set for launch in early 2024. OCI will have a spectral resolution of 5 nm and a spatial resolution of similar to 1 km with global coverage in 1-2 d. At this spectral resolution, small-scale spectral structure from NO2 absorption is still present. We use real spectra from the OMI to simulate OCI spectra that are in turn used to estimate NO2 slant column densities (SCDs) with an artificial neural network (NN) trained on target OMI retrievals. While we obtain good results with no noise added to the OCI simulated spectra, we find that the expected instrumental noise substantially degrades the OCI NO2 retrievals. Nevertheless, the NO2 information from OCI may be of value for ocean color retrievals. OCI retrievals can also be temporally averaged over timescales of the order of months to reduce noise and provide higher-spatial-resolution maps that may be useful for downscaling lower-spatial-resolution data provided by instruments such as OMI and TROPOMI; this downscaling could potentially enable higher-resolution emissions estimates and be useful for other applications. In addition, we show that NNs that use coefficients of leading modes of a principal component analysis of radiance spectra as inputs appear to enable noise reduction in NO2 retrievals. Once trained, NNs can also substantially speed up NO2 spectral fitting algorithms as applied to OMI, TROPOMI, and similar instruments that are flying or will soon fly in geostationary orbit.

Automated summary

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is an important trace-gas pollutant and climate agent that affects ocean color retrievals. Satellite UV-Vis spectrometers, such as OMI and TROPOMI, have been used to retrieve NO2 column densities, but this study explores the possibility of using lower-spectral-resolution hyperspectral imagers like OCI for NO2 retrieval. Although OCI's spectral resolution is lower, it still captures the small-scale spectral structure caused by NO2 absorption. The study shows that while OCI's NO2 retrievals are limited by instrumental noise, they can still provide valuable information for ocean color retrievals and can be used for downscaling lower-resolution data.