| Summary: | International audience Carbon monoxide (CO) is a reactive toxic gas, mainly produced by the combustion of fossil fuels and vegetation burning. It also plays an important role in the budget of tropospheric ozone and can be used a tracer for transport of sources of different origin. The impact of the transport of such pollutants on climate change in the Arctic still remains to be quantified with global models often failing to reproduce seasonal cycles especially in summertime. One possible explanation is the underestimation of modelled ozone production in forest fires plumes. This study focuses on the analysis of the POLARCAT/IPY spring and summer campaigns which took place, in Kiruna, Sweden in April 2008 and in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland in July 2008. During the campaigns different air masses were sampled including clean air, polluted plumes originating from anthropogenic sources in Europe and North America, and forest fire plumes from Siberia and Canada. These different transport pathways were well observed by the IASI (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer) interferometer, onboard the METOP-A satellite. Measurements of CO collected by the ATR-42 aircraft as part of POLARCAT-France have been used to validate the satellite measurements. Furthermore, a more general validation procedure was developed to compare IASI with ATR-42, DLR-Falcon, NASA DC-8 and NOAA P3-B CO data. YAK summer flights in Siberia are also available for these comparisons. Both in-situ and satellite data are also compared to simulations from the LMDz-INCA global chemistry model. We will discuss how the good global coverage of IASI and regional flights allow can be used improve estimates of CO emissions and to evaluate the impact of forest fires on CO and O 3 (ozone) distributions.
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