In 1997, wildfire burned extensively in Indonesia, South America and Africa.
Attention was mostly drawn to Indonesia because of the severity of the fire mainly
due to the 1997 EL-Nino event. This leads to emission of NOx and VOCs whose
subsequent photochemical and oxidation reactions eventually lead to tropospheric
ozone production.
In order to investigate the effects of these emissions on tropospheric ozone
production, the FUll Retrieval Method (FURM) Algorithm was employed to
derive the tropospheric ozone vertical column for Watukusek, Indonesia not only
for the year 1997, but also for 1998. FURM employs the GOME data in achieving
this objective.
GOME is an earth observation instrument, launched in 1995 on the European
Remote Sensing (ERS-2) satellite by the European space Agency (ESA). It is a
diode array based spectrometer which measures the atmospheric spectrum with
continuous coverage in the nadir mode from 240 nm to 790 nm at a resolution of
about 0.2 nm in the ultra-violet and 0.4 nm in the visible regions respectively. This
wide range allows not only for the retrieval of the distribution of Ozone, but also
other atmospheric trace species such as NO2, BRO, O2, O4, and water vapour.
Stratospheric concentrations of OClO, HCHO, SO2, and ClO could also be
determined under special conditions.
Finally , so as to validate the retrieval efficiency of the FURM algorithm, the
derived tropospheric ozone vertical column was compared to that as observed by
the SHADOZ-Sonde (a balloon based measurement) for the same location.