Description: The ozone profile records of a large number of limb and occultation satellite instruments are widely used to address several key questions in ozone research. Further progress in some domains depends on a more detailed understanding of these data sets, especially of their long-term stability and their mutual consistency. To this end, we made a systematic assessment of 14 limb and occultation sounders that, together, provide more than three decades of global ozone profile measurements. In particular, we considered the latest operational Level-2 records by SAGE II, SAGE III, HALOE, UARS MLS, Aura MLS, POAM II, POAM III, OSIRIS, SMR, GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY, ACE-FTS and MAESTRO. Central to our work is a consistent and robust analysis of the comparisons against the ground-based ozonesonde and stratospheric ozone lidar networks. It allowed us to investigate, from the troposphere up to the stratopause, the following main aspects of satellite data quality: long-term stability, overall bias and short-term variability, together with their dependence on geophysical parameters and profile representation. In addition, it permitted us to quantify the overall consistency between the ozone profilers. Generally, we found that between 20 and 40 km the satellite ozone measurement biases are smaller than ±5 %, the short-term variabilities are less than 5–12 % and the drifts are at most ±5 %  per decade (or even ±3 % per  decade for a few records). The agreement with ground-based data degrades somewhat towards the stratopause and especially towards the tropopause where natural variability and low ozone abundances impede a more precise analysis. In part of the stratosphere a few records deviate from the preceding general conclusions; we identified biases of 10 % and more (POAM II and SCIAMACHY), markedly higher single-profile variability (SMR and SCIAMACHY) and significant long-term drifts (SCIAMACHY, OSIRIS, HALOE and possibly GOMOS and SMR as well). Furthermore, we reflected on the repercussions of our findings for the construction, analysis and interpretation of merged data records. Most notably, the discrepancies between several recent ozone profile trend assessments can be mostly explained by instrumental drift. This clearly demonstrates the need for systematic comprehensive multi-instrument comparison analyses.

Description: The use of assimilation tools for satellite validation requires true estimates of the accuracy of the reference data. Since its inception, the Network for Detection of Stratospheric Change (NDSC) has provided systematic lidar measurements of ozone and temperature at several places around the world that are well adapted for satellite validations. Regular exercises have been organised to ensure the data quality at each individual site. These exercises can be separated into three categories: large scale intercomparisons using multiple instruments, including a mobile lidar; using satellite observations as a geographic transfer standards to compare measurements at different sites; and comparative investigations of the analysis software. NDSC is a research network, so each system has its own history, design, and analysis, and has participated differently in validation campaigns. There are still some technological differences that may explain different accuracies. However, the comparison campaigns performed over the last decade have always proved to be very helpful in improving the measurements. To date, more efforts have been devoted to characterising ozone measurements than to temperature observations. The synthesis of the published works shows that the network can potentially be considered as homogeneous within +/-2% between 20-35 km for ozone and +/-1 K between 35-60 km for temperature. Outside this altitude range, larger biases are reported and more efforts are required. In the lower stratosphere, Raman channels seem to improve comparisons but such capabilities were not systematically compared. At the top of the profiles, more investigations on analysis methodologies are still probably needed. SAGE II and GOMOS appear to be excellent tools for future ozone lidar validations but need to be better coordinated and take more advantage of assimilation tools. Also, temperature validations face major difficulties caused by atmospheric tides and therefore require intercomparisons with the mobile systems, at all sites.