Articles | Volume 10, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-2759-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-2759-2017
Research article
 | 
31 Jul 2017
Research article |  | 31 Jul 2017

Evaluation and attribution of OCO-2 XCO2 uncertainties

John R. Worden, Gary Doran, Susan Kulawik, Annmarie Eldering, David Crisp, Christian Frankenberg, Chris O'Dell, and Kevin Bowman

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Short summary
This paper evaluates the uncertainties of the total column carbon dioxide (XCO2) measurements from the NASA OCO-2 instrument by comparing observed variations in small geographical regions to the calculated uncertainties of the data within this region. In general we find that the reported XCO2 precision is related to that expected from the XCO2 radiance noise. However, the reported accuracy is at least smaller than the actual accuracy by a factor of 2–4.