An eleven year record of XCO2 estimates derived from GOSAT measurements using the NASA ACOS version 9 retrieval algorithm

The Thermal And Near infrared Sensor for carbon Observation – Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TANSO-FTS) on the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) has been returning data since April 2009. The version 9 (v9) Atmospheric Carbon Observations from Space (ACOS) Level 2 Full Physics (L2FP) retrieval algorithm (Kiel et al., 2019) was used to derive estimates of carbon dioxide (CO2) dry air mole fraction (XCO2) from the TANSO-FTS measurements collected over it's first eleven years of operation. The bias correction and quality filtering of the L2FP XCO2 product were evaluated using estimates derived from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) as well as values simulated from a suite of global atmospheric inverse modeling systems (models). In addition, the v9 ACOS GOSAT XCO2 results were compared with collocated XCO2 estimates derived from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), using the version 10 (v10) ACOS L2FP algorithm. These tests indicate that the v9 ACOS GOSAT XCO2 product has improved throughput, scatter and bias, when compared to the earlier v7.3 ACOS GOSAT product, which extended through mid 2016. Of the 37 million (M) soundings collected by GOSAT through June 2020, approximately 20 % were selected for processing by the v9 L2FP algorithm after screening for clouds and other artifacts. After post-processing, 5.4 % of the soundings (2M out of 37M) were assigned a “good” XCO2 quality flag, as compared to 3.9 % in v7.3 (