Optical remote sensing of greenhouse gases in the troposphere

A system of satellite borne sensor is proposed for measuring the column amount of greenhouse gases in the troposphere from observations of near infrared solar radiation in the sun glint region reflected from water surface of ocean and lakes. A high accuracy determination of the column amount of gases is achieved by measuring the difference of absorption line of greenhouse gas from that of oxygen with using tunable etalons of high resolving power. It is demonstrated by the ground-based measurements of the absorption line of carbon dioxide in the direct solar radiation that the column amount is obtainable with the standard deviation of about 0.4%. The satellite sensor system presented in this paper is compared with other methods from the viewpoint of retrieval error.