Impact of stray light on greenhouse gas concentration retrievals and emission estimates as observed with the passive airborne remote sensing imager MAMAP2D-Light

Abstract. MAMAP2D-Light is an airborne passive remote sensing imaging push-broom spectrometer developed at the Institute for Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen to determine atmospheric methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) column anomalies in the 1.6 µm-band to quantify point-source emissions. In its initial version, as flown in 2022 in Canada, a significant stray light level of 5.6 % of the measured signal has been observed post-campaign, causing apparent error patterns in the retrieved CO2 and CH4 column anomalies. Measurement data collected during an airborne campaign in 2022 in Canada offer the unique opportunity to investigate the end-to-end impact of stray light and its correction on the retrieved CO2 and CH4 column anomalies, as well as the derived emission rates. We successfully developed and applied a stray light correction to the instrument and investigated its impact on the CH4/CO2 proxy method, the CH4 column, and derived point-source emissions. In nearly all cases, applying the CH4/CO2 proxy method reduced the stray-light-related column errors below the CH4 column noise. The derived emission rates for the proxy-retrieval with and without stray light corrected spectra are comparable, proving the ability of the CH4/CO2 proxy method to correct stray-light-related artifacts. In this paper, we additionally investigate the impact on the CH4 total column retrieval for a high contrast scene condition under which the correction by applying the proxy method is no longer sufficient. Following the initial campaign in 2022, the post-campaign stray light characterization and analysis revealed that a significant fraction of stray light was attributed to reflective surfaces in the object plane of the spectrometer. Based on these findings, the total stray light was reduced by ∼ 63 % by implementing a hardware modification from 2023 onward.