Seven years of data quality of the ENVISAT Atmospheric-Chemistry missions: highlights, lessons learned and perspectives

The instrument and products monitoring is an essential tool to efficiently exploit the ESA operational products. The main goal of the monitoring activities is to provide to the science community a reliable and coherent dataset, avoiding that erroneous input data is used for the scientific analysis. The Quality Control (QC) process is based on a day-to-day operational monitoring that allows the timely detection of instrument and product anomalies. In addition, the QC tasks include the long term analysis of instrument and product key quality indicators allowing to assess the instrument performances, to prevent degradation and to drive corrective actions. The value of the QC service for the science user was demonstrated during the operations of ERS and ENVISAT satellites. The QC service will play a crucial role in future ESA missions, not only for the satellite operations, but also for supporting the definition of the products template, of the monitoring baseline and of the Calibration and Validation plan and as a vital source of information to the users.