ESA Greenhouse Gases Climate Change Initiative (GHG_cci): Column averaged carbon dioxide from OCO-2 generated with the FOCAL algorithm, version 11.0

This dataset contains column-average dry-air mole fractions of atmospheric carbon dioxide (XCO2) data, generated using the fast atmospheric trace gas retrieval for OCO2 (FOCAL-OCO2). The FOCAL-OCO2 algorithm has been setup to retrieve XCO2 by analysing hyper spectral solar backscattered radiance measurements from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite. FOCAL includes a radiative transfer model which has been developed to approximate light scattering effects by multiple scattering at an optically thin scattering layer. This reduces the computational costs by several orders of magnitude. FOCAL's radiative transfer model is utilised to simulate the radiance in all three OCO-2 spectral bands allowing the simultaneous retrieval of CO2, H2O, and solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence. The product is limited to cloud-free scenes on the Earth's day side. This dataset is also referred to as CO2_OC2_FOCA.This version of the data (v11) was produced as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Greenhouse Gases (GHG) project (GHG-CCI+, http://cci.esa.int/ghg).The FOCAL OCO-2 XCO2 retrieval development, data processing and analysis has received co-funding from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI+) via project GHG-CCI+ (contract 4000126450/19/I-NB, https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/ghgs), EUMETSAT via the FOCAL-CO2M study (contract EUM/CO/19/4600002372/RL), the European Union via the Horizon 2020 (H2020) projects VERIFY (Grant Agreement No. 776810, http://verify.lsce.ipsl.fr) and CHE (Grant Agreement No. 776186, https://www.che-project.eu), and by the State and the University of Bremen.When citing this data, please also cite the following peer-reviewed publications:M.Reuter, M.Buchwitz, O.Schneising, S.Noël, V.Rozanov, H.Bovensmann and J.P.Burrows: A Fast Atmospheric Trace Gas Retrieval for Hyperspectral Instruments Approximating Multiple Scattering - Part 1: Radiative Transfer and a Potential OCO-2 XCO2 Retrieval Setup, Remote Sensing, 9(11), 1159; doi:10.3390/rs9111159, 2017M.Reuter, M.Buchwitz, O.Schneising, S.Noël, H.Bovensmann and J.P.Burrows: A Fast Atmospheric Trace Gas Retrieval for Hyperspectral Instruments Approximating Multiple Scattering - Part 2: Application to XCO2 Retrievals from OCO-2, Remote Sensing, 9(11), 1102; doi:10.3390/rs9111102, 2017