Internal consistency of the IAGOS ozone and carbon monoxidemeasurements for the last 25 years

Abstract. The In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System is a European research infrastructure that equips Airbus A340/330 with a system for monitoring atmospheric composition. The IAGOS instruments have three different configurations: IAGOS-CORE, IAGOS-MOZAIC and IAGOS-CARIBIC. Since 1994, there have been a total of 17 aircraft equipped. In this study, we perform an inter-comparison of about 8000 landing and take-off profiles to compare the O3 and CO measurements performed from these different configurations. The collocated profiles used in the study met various selection criteria. The first was a maximal 1 hour time difference between an ascent or descent by two different aircraft at the same airport and the second was a selection based on the similarity of air masses based on the meteorological data acquired by the aircraft. We provide here an evaluation of the internal consistency of the O3 and CO measurements since 1994. For both O3 and CO, we find no drift in the bias amongst the different instrument units (6 O3 and 6 CO IAGOS-MOZAIC instruments, 9 IAGOS-CORE Package 1 and the 2 instruments used in the IAGOS-CARIBIC aircraft). This results gives us confidence that the entire IAGOS data base can be treated as one continuous program, and is therefore appropriate for studies of long-term trends.