Do GEMS geostationary satellite observations of tropospheric NO 2 always improve NO x emission estimates and related air quality modelling?

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Abstract. Satellite observations of atmospheric composition from low Earth orbit (LEO) have significantly advanced our understanding of global tropospheric chemistry; however, their 12 h overpass cadence limits the attribution of rapid compositional changes. The launch of the Korean Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) in 2020 heralded the beginning of continuous spaceborne monitoring of atmospheric composition during sunlit hours across Asia, allowing researchers to track atmospheric variability in real-time from a geostationary perspective. We assess the added value of GEMS observations of tropospheric NO2 to estimate monthly NOx emissions across Asia compared with the information provided by the equivalent instrument in LEO. We use the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry transport model to infer NOx emissions, comparing estimates using the full set of GEMS tropospheric NO2 data against a surrogate LEO dataset created by subsampling the GEMS data at 13:45 local time (Korea Standard Time). We find that the benefits of assimilating high-frequency GEMS observations are most significant during non-summer months (September–May), when elevated NO2 concentrations provide strong constraints on emission estimates. During this period, anthropogenic NOx emission estimates derived from the full GEMS record deviate from LEO-proxy results, with differences of 0.2–52.6 Gg N per month, corresponding to 0.02 %–5.06 % of the a priori emissions. These differences further propagate into widespread adjustments in modelled ozone, hydroxyl radicals, and other secondary species, with evaluation against independent in situ measurements showing that GEMS-inferred emission estimates offer comparable or superior performance particularly in regions where the differences are most pronounced. In contrast, we find that during summer months (June–August), low NO2 levels for which a larger fraction originates from lightning and other background sources with greater uncertainties likely challenge our 4D-Var framework, leading to negligible or even detrimental impacts on our ability to estimate NOx emissions.

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