The empirically corrected TOMS data

In July 1996, the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instrument was launched on the Earth Probe (EP) satellite. The total ozone column (TOC) observations derived from this satellite instrument began to display significant deviations from the ground truth by the middle of the year 2000. Haffner et al. (2004) indicated that the detected error in the instrument performance appears to depend on latitude, season, lifetime, and wavelength Thus, NASA GSFC warned users that EP-TOMS TOC data after the year 2000 are not recommended for the calculation of long-term ozone trends. To correct the influence of this instrument degradation, an empirical calibration technique was applied to the TOC data according to the personal comunication of McPeters et al. (2007). This empirically corrected TOMS data (EP-TOMS V8-corrected) has been made available since September 2007. The recent paper of Antón et al. (2010) presented the global comparisons between the TOC satellite observations derived from the V8-original and V8-corrected EP-TOMS data using reliable ground-based measurements as reference.This work showed that EP-TOMS V8-corrected total ozone data present a remarkable improvement concerning the significant negative bias of around ∼3% detected in the EP-TOMS V8-originnal observations after the year 2000.