Quality of MIPAS operational products

To the latest release of MIPAS products distributed by the European Space Agency a new procedure has been applied that provides a description of the quality of the retrieved parameters as a function of altitude, using two complementary quantifiers, namely: the “relative information distribution” and the “degrees of freedom distribution”. The procedure is applied to the three datasets of the MIPAS operational products showing that the quantifiers provide an useful tool for the comparison of the different operational choices made either in the observations (spectral resolution and limb sounding grid) or in the retrieval (microwindows used in the data analysis). The quantifiers characterize as a function of altitude the information provided by the MIPAS products and can be used to assess the redundancies and the complementarities of these products with those of other experiments.

► The quality assessment of MIPAS operational products is provided. ► The distributions of relative information and degrees of freedom are jointly used. ► This is a new quality assessment method providing altitude dependent information. ► The method shows that best quality is obtained for optimized resolution products. ► The method can assess redundancies and complementarities of different observations.