This product is the column-average dry-air mole fraction of atmospheric methane, denoted XCH4. It has been retrieved from radiance measurements from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite in the 2.3 µm spectral range of the solar spectral range, using the Weighting Function Modified Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (WFM-DOAS or WFMD) retrieval algorithm. This dataset is also referred to as CH4_S5P_WFMD. This version of the product is version 1.2, and covers the period from November 2017 - July 2020.

The WFMD algorithm is based on iteratively fitting a simulated radiance spectrum to the measured spectrum using a least-squares method. The algorithm is very fast as it is based on a radiative transfer model based look-up table scheme. The product is limited to cloud-free scenes on the Earth's day side.

These data were produced as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Greenhouse Gases (GHG) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project.

When citing this dataset, please also cite the following peer-reviewed publication:

Schneising, O., Buchwitz, M., Reuter, M., Bovensmann, H., Burrows, J. P., Borsdorff, T., Deutscher, N. M., Feist, D. G., Griffith, D. W. T., Hase, F., Hermans, C., Iraci, L. T., Kivi, R., Landgraf, J., Morino, I., Notholt, J., Petri, C., Pollard, D. F., Roche, S., Shiomi, K., Strong, K., Sussmann, R., Velazco, V. A., Warneke, T., and Wunch, D.: A scientific algorithm to simultaneously retrieve carbon monoxide and methane from TROPOMI onboard Sentinel-5 Precursor, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 12, 6771–6802, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6771-2019, 2019.