The Role of Polarisation Measurements in Ozone Profile Retrieval from Back-scattered Ultraviolet Sunlight

Ozone is one of the most important trace gases and it plays a variety of important roles in the earth's atmosphere. The direct and indirect effects of ozone on atmospheric chemistry, on the earth's climate system, and on the UV surface fluxes depend not only on the vertically integrated ozone amount but also on its vertical distribution. To study the related scientific issues on a global scale, in 1995 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) on board of the second European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-2). GOME is a nadir viewing grating spectrometer measuring at around 0.2 nm spectral resolution in the spectral range 240 to 790 nm. More information about the GOME instrument is given in the overview paper by Burrows et al. 1999.