Atmospheric carbon dioxide is a key greenhouse gas. Global monitoring of carbon dioxide would be helpful to improving the understanding of climate change. Ground-based observations usually have higher resolution and signal-to-noise ratio and more known parameters than satellite-based observations, which make it easier to achieve a better retrieval precision. Ground-based retrieval method could be extended to satellite scenarios, and it could also provide validation for satellite data. The main procedure of the retrieval method was established, and this procedure was validated by simulated retrieval. It was proved that the method could get reasonable results under certain system errors. The retrieval of ground-based FTS spectra showed that this method has a potential to obtain atmospheric carbon dioxide column information.