Ground-based and satellite measurements of stratospheric nitrogen dioxide and ozone over the south of Italy

Abstract

Nitrogen oxides as well as ozone play a central role in atmospheric chemistry and the improvement of techniques and instruments allowing for a better understanding of the distributions and behaviour of the mentioned compounds are strongly required by the scientific community. Thanks to the new satellite technology, global scenes of the dynamical and chemical processes of the atmospheric compounds can be drawn. Ground-based equipments have to be used for comparison/validation of the satellite retrievals. The LIS (Lampedusa Island Spectrometer) instrument is a SPATRAM (SPectrometer for Atmospheric TRacers and Aerosol Measurement) type equipment allowing for the measurements of spectral sky radiance along the zenith direction, in its standard configuration. Here, the first results obtained with the LIS spectrometer installed in the centre of Palermo (Italy) for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) total columns, and the comparisons with data from the OMI – Ozone Monitoring Instrument on board of AURA satellite for O3 total column are presented and discussed.