The TROPOMI instrument aboard the SENTINEL-5P space craft is a nadir-viewing, imaging spectrometer covering wavelength bands between the ultraviolet and the shortwave infra-red. TROPOMI's purpose is to measure atmospheric properties and constituents. It is contributing to monitoring air quality and providing critical information to services and decision makers.

The instrument uses passive remote sensing techniques by measuring the Top Of Atmosphere (TOA) solar radiation reflected by and radiated from the earth and its atmosphere. The four spectrometers of TROPOMI cover the ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS), Near Infra-Red (NIR) and Short Wavelength Infra-Red (SWIR) domains of the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing operational retrieval of the following trace gas constituents: Ozone (O3), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Formaldehyde (HCHO), Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Methane (CH4).

This product displays the Cloud Optical Thickness (COT) around the globe. Clouds play a crucial role in the Earth's climate system and have significant effects on trace gas retrievals. The cloud optical thickness is retrieved from the O2-A band using the ROCINN algorithm. Daily observations are binned onto a regular latitude-longitude grid.

This product is created in the scope of the project INPULS. It develops (a) innovative retrieval algorithms and processors for the generation of value-added products from the atmospheric Copernicus missions Sentinel-5 Precursor, Sentinel-4, and Sentinel-5, (b) cloud-based (re)processing systems, (c) improved data discovery and access technologies as well as server-side analytics for the users, and (d) data visualization services.