Satellite Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Composition & Gaseous Air Quality

Satellites fill the gap between scattered ground monitors and the regional picture that policy and impact assessment need. TROPOMI covers the whole planet every day at 5.5 × 3.5 km. GEMS, TEMPO and Sentinel-4 now add hourly daytime NO₂, and the ozone record reaches back to TOMS in 1978. The programme is written for environmental engineers, air-quality officers, EIA consultants, GIS and remote-sensing analysts, researchers and regulators. It covers NO₂, SO₂, O₃, CO, HCHO, CH₄, CO₂ and NH₃ from light absorption through to finished maps. It starts with the atmosphere itself: the layers that matter, short- and long-lived gases, WHO 2021 guideline levels, and the difference between a surface concentration and a satellite column. It then works through the physics: the Beer–Lambert law, scattering, the spectral windows for each gas, air-mass factors and averaging kernels. Learners convert units, estimate a surface value from a column, and learn why the air-mass factor dominates the error budget. The instrument and retrieval modules cover LEO and geostationary orbits, push-broom and Fourier-transform spectrometers, calibration and five decades of missions. They then explain retrieval: DOAS, stratospheric correction, cloud handling, optimal estimation, full-physics and proxy greenhouse-gas methods, and the error budget for a single NO₂ pixel. They pay particular attention to bright desert albedo, dust and deep boundary layers over the Gulf. Seven hands-on labs in Python, HARP and Google Earth Engine take learners from opening a Level-2 file to QA filtering, gridding, monthly maps, oversampling, weekly emission fingerprints and hourly TEMPO data. A city NO₂ assessment serves as the lab deliverable. Validation covers Pandora, MAX-DOAS, TCCON and robust statistics. The applications module covers line-density and flux-divergence emission estimates, methane plume sizing, ozone-regime ratios, forecasting, hazards and EIA and policy uses. Eight case studies bring the methods together: COVID-19 NO₂, methane ultra-emitters, the Permian inversion, Hunga Tonga, Australia’s Black Summer, the global SO₂ catalogue, first light from TEMPO and Sentinel-4, and a Gulf-region group exercise. The programme closes with a dataset-selection guide, a ten-point checklist for reviewing a consultant or agency report, future missions, machine learning, a capstone and an appendix of mission data sheets. Assessment is an online 20-question exam at a 70% pass mark, leading to a verifiable SKEDMIA certificate.