ESA wind mission Aeolus hosts the first space-based Doppler Wind Lidar (DWL) world-wide. Its scientific objectives are to improve Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) and to advance the understanding of atmospheric dynamics and its interaction with the atmospheric energy and water cycle. The primary data product is profiles of horizontally projected line-of-sight winds from the surface …
Certainly not according to available data. The claim of a so called “ozone hole” in the tropical lower stratosphere, “seven times larger in area than the one over Antarctica” (see Fig. 1), was made by a – highly controversial – paper (Lu, 2022). The study used data from the smoothed and gap-filled version of the …
A team of researchers estimated the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from coal-fired power plants and other major anthropogenic point sources in the South African Highveld region using space-based data. The results indicate that CO2 emissions can be obtained also in challenging cases where the plumes from multiple sources overlap. The new publication characterizes CO2 emissions …
Methane is among the most important greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, causing rapid global warming. A recent study indicates that tropical methane emissions explain a large fraction of the global atmospheric methane growth (Feng et al., 2022). The relatively short lifetime of methane of about a decade makes methane emissions an attractive target of …
3DCTRL project aims to evaluate cloud correction methodologies in Copernicus Sentinel-4, Sentinel-5 and Sentinel-5p trace gas retrieval schemes and to explore ways to improve handling of realistic clouds in the retrievals of atmospheric species. Cloud shadow fraction, cloud top height, cloud optical depth, solar zenith and viewing angles, were identified as the metrics being the …
Atmospheric aerosol is one of the main drivers of climate changes. Importance of accurate global aerosol characterization for climate studies and air pollution monitoring is a well recognized problem (e.g., see IPCC AR5 by Boucher et al.2013). In addition to the traditional spectral Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) such characterization should also include such extended aerosol …
Air pollution is one of the current major environmental issues affecting human health at the global scale, therefore monitoring air pollution in urban and suburban areas is of great societal importance. The monitoring of air quality at urban scales is currently based on telemetric in-situ networks, which provide continuous observations with high accuracy of a …
POPCORN is a novel data processing approach for satellite data post-process correction. POPCORN combines the best aspects of the conventional physics-based retrieval algorithms and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. The aim of the POPCORN project is to develop novel machine-learning-based post-process correction methodology that will improve the Earth observation satellite data accuracy. The methodology will be …
The European Space Agency (ESA) organised an Earth Observation (EO) training course in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The course took place from 19 – 23 September 2022 at the premises of the Andoya Space Centre (ASC) in Andenes, Norway. The training was designed to promote and disseminate EO data and information-based …
Climate change is one of the greatest societal challenges of the 21st century. The dominant source of global warming is the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the Earth`s atmosphere. atmosphere. The two most important of those species are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Together they account for ~82% of the anthropogenic radiative forcing. …
