Machine learning-based aerosol characterization using OCO-2 O₂ A-band observations

Aerosol scattering influences the retrieval of the column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO₂ (XCO₂) from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). This is especially true for surfaces with reflectance close to a critical value where there is very low sensitivity to aerosol loading. A spectral sorting approach was introduced to improve the characterization of aerosols over coastal regions. Here, we generalize this procedure to land surfaces and use a two-step neural network to retrieve aerosol parameters from OCO-2 measurements. We show that, by using a combination of radiance measurements in the continuum and inside the absorption band, both the aerosol optical depth and layer height, as well as their uncertainties, can be accurately predicted. Using the improved aerosol estimates as a priori, we demonstrate that the accuracy of the XCO₂ retrieval can be significantly improved compared to the OCO-2 Level-2 Standard product. Furthermore, using simulated observations, we obtain estimates of the error in the retrieved XCO₂. These simulations indicate that the bias-corrected OCO-2 Lite data, which is used for flux inversions, may have remaining biases due to interference of aerosol effects.