The Geostationary Emission Explorer for Europe (G3E) is a concept for a geostationary satellite sounder that targets at constraining the sources and sinks of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) for continental-scale regions. Thereby, its primary focus is on Central Europe. G3E carries a spectrometer system that collects sunlight backscattered from the Earth\u27s surface and atmosphere in the near-infrared (NIR) and shortwave-infrared (SWIR) spectral range. Solar absorption spectra allow for spatiotemporally dense observations of the column-average concentrations of carbon dioxide (XCO2), methane (XCH4), and carbon monoxide (XCO) including sampling of the diurnal variation with several measurements per day during summer. Here, we present the mission concept and carry out an initial performance assessment of the retrieval capabilities. The radiometric performance of the 4 grating spectrometers is tuned to reconcile small ground-pixel sizes (~ 2 km × 3 km at 50° latitude) with short single-shot exposures (∼ 2.9 s) that allow for sampling continental regions such as Central Europe within 2 h while providing sufficient signal-to-noise. The noise errors to be expected for XCO2, XCH4, and XCO are assessed through retrieval simulations for a European trial ensemble. Generally, single-shot precision for the targeted XCO2 and XCH4 is better than 0.5 % with some exception for scenes with low infrared surface albedo observed under low sun conditions in winter. For XCO, precision is generally better than 10 %. Performance for aerosol and cirrus loaded atmospheres is assessed by mimicking G3E\u27s slant view on Europe for an ensemble of atmospheric scattering properties used previously for evaluating nadir-viewing low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. While retrieval concepts developed for LEO configurations generally succeed in mitigating aerosol and cirrus induced retrieval errors for G3E\u27s setup, residual errors are somewhat greater in geostationary orbit (GEO) than in LEO. G3E\u27s deployment in the vicinity of the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites suggests making synergistic use of MTG\u27s sounding capabilities e.g. with respect to characterization of aerosol and cloud properties or with respect to enhancing carbon monoxide retrievals by combining G3E\u27s solar and MTG\u27s thermal infrared spectra
