Dear Colleagues,

The satellite remote sensing of global atmospheric carbon greenhouse gases (GHGs) has received increased interest and attention in recent years in an effort to obtain global observations aimed at facilitating our understanding of global climate change and air quality (AQ) forecasts. Climate change detection requires the ability to resolve small global signals over decadal timescales (ΔT ≈ 0.1 K per decade), and AQ assessments require measurements at relatively fine spatial scales (<1 km).  In particular, increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄), the two most important long-lived GHGs, are primary contributors to anthropogenic climate change. However, the processes involved in the increase of emissions (e.g., regional sources and/or sinks) are not completely understood, in part due to the sparseness of data. Satellite missions dedicated to global GHG observation have thus been designed and implemented, with satellite missions originally designed for numerical weather forecasting applications (e.g., Joint Polar Satellite System, JPSS, payloads) also being adapted to complement existing observing systems. This has led to a growing complement of derived carbon GHG products and state parameters (environmental data records, climate data records, etc.) being retrieved from spectral radiances for the global observation of atmospheric composition at varying spatiotemporal scales.

We are pleased to announce this follow-up Part II Special Issue, which will continue the focus of Part I on the satellite remote sensing of long-lived carbon GHGs, specifically CH₄ and CO₂, from advanced passive sensors (thermal IR and near-IR) essential for Earth (atmospheric/oceanic) observation onboard operational, experimental and next-generation environmental satellites, including but not limited to dedicated missions such as GOSAT, OCO-2, TROPOMI, Sentinel-2, GHGSAT, MethaneSAT, as well as more traditional operational satellite missions such as JPSS-2, NOAA-20, SNPP, Aqua, Metop-B,-C, GOES-16,-17,-18, MSG/MTG, Himawari-8, and FY satellites, and planned future missions such as GOSAT-GW, CarbonMapper, MERLIN, OCO-3, etc. We invite papers on the remote sensing of these gases, including retrieval algorithms, validation, and applications.

Dr. Lihang Zhou
Dr. Nicholas Nalli
Guest Editors

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• satellite data calibration
• validation
• cal/val
• measurement
• applications