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Ozone Monitoring Instrument OMI is an imaging spectrometer that uses two-dimensional CCDs for simultaneous spatial and spectral registration. It measures in the spectral range between 270 and 500 nm, with a spectral resolution of approximately 0.5 nm. The spectral sampling varies from 0.15 to 0.32 nm. The swath width of OMI is 2600 km, which provides daily global coverage, see Figure A. To obtain this large swath, the viewing zenith angle at the end of the swath is 57°. Figure A. The coverage of the OMI. At the equator the OMI provides daily global coverage, whereas at higher latitudes more two or more overpasses per day will be available.

In the normal operation mode, the OMI pixel size is 13x24 km? at nadir (along x across track), however in the zoom mode the spatial resolution can be reduced to 13x12 km? . An impression of the spatial resolution of OMI is given in Figure B. Due to the small ground pixel size, OMI can look ``in between the clouds'', thus being able to obtain tropospheric information on ozone, NO2 and aerosols. Figure B. AVHRR channel 2 image over Europe resampled to a grid of approximately 13x40 km? , to give an impression of the spatial resolution of OMI.