The influence of surface elevation on atmospheric CO2 observations is explored from the perspective of forward and inversion of the atmospheric radiation transfer model in this work. The surface elevation data from the shuttle radar topography mission (SRTM) show that the error of the mean surface elevation due to inaccurate satellite pointing in the plains near Beijing is small, with a maximum error of approximately 10 m for a pointing offset of 0.1-10 km. However, in the mountainous areas and in the boundaries between mountainous areas and plains, the error of the mean surface elevation is large, with the maximum errors of 713.98 and 515.61 m, respectively. The CO2 inversion results show that for an elevation change of 100 m, the CO2 column density deviates by 3.29×10 -6. Thus, the research results show that the surface elevation deviation is a critical factor in performing atmospheric CO2 inversion with high precision.