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 …
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 …
The importance of nitrous acid (HONO) in atmospheric chemistry stems from its role as precursor of the OH radical.The latter is among the most important oxidizing molecules and controls the degradation of pollutants and greenhouse gases, and contributes to ozone formation and photochemical smog. Accurate representation of HONO sources is highly relevant to the modeling …
The detection of trace gas plumes allows us to improve attribution of pollutant emissions and photochemical processing in the global troposphere. Data collected by the ESA TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) has resulted in a growing number of case studies that have used ad hoc methods to detect plumes for science applications. Developing a more comprehensive …
Stratospheric ozone (the “ozone layer”) protects the biosphere from harmful UltraViolet (UV) radiation. Ozone (O3) is expected to recover as a consequence of the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 and its Amendments regulating the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances (ODS). The stratospheric halogen amount (mainly bromine and chlorine) released by ODSs reached its maximum abundance in …
Observing and understanding aerosol properties is fundamental for the remote sensing community, yet things get more complicated in cloudy environments. Pixels located in the transition zone between pure cloud and pure aerosol are often discarded by both aerosol and cloud algorithms, despite being essential for studying aerosol–cloud interactions, which still represent the largest source of …
A high level of innovation in algorithm development and methodological approach is the key feature of the activities performed during the ESA S5P+Innovation AOD/BRDF project. Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is the single most comprehensive variable for the remote assessment of the aerosol load in the atmosphere. Atmospheric aerosols, such as aerosols from the burning of …
Pollutant and greenhouse gas emission inventories provide essential information for policy makers, governments and subsidiary bodies to evaluate progress towards emission abatement measures, and decide on future strategies. Inventories use different methodologies between countries, and have large uncertainties related to both activity data and emission factors. The use of satellite data, notably the imagery of …
The educational materials (slides and recordings of the sessions) from the 3rd EUMETSAT/ESA/ECMWF joint training in atmospheric composition held online from 6 to 17 December 2021 can be accessed from the link on the left menu.
LuftBlick Earth Observation Technologies (LuftBlick) and the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA) propose to develop a novel algorithm to derive ozone profiles from measurements of ground-based passive remote sensing instruments. These are the highlights of our proposed activity: The novel algorithm distinguishes itself in several ways from existing approaches: It uses MAX-DOAS sky …
