Monitor the atmosphere includes monitoring of the atmosphere composition and air quality, as well as forecasting of sunlight exposure. Timely, continuous, and independent data on the atmosphere is useful in various domains like health, agriculture, renewable energies, urban planning, climate sciences and biology. The atmosphere composition includes greenhouse gases (GHG) like carbon dioxide, methane, NO2 and SO2. They are part of the Earth system and have a strong impact on the climate. To monitor changes in atmosphere composition enables modelling climate change and understanding the impact of human-induced emissions of GHG relative to natural sources. EO-derived products include inventory of emission data as an input to atmospheric chemistry transport models and forecast models. Inventories are based on a combination of existing data sets and new information, describing emissions from fossil fuel use, ships, volcanoes, and vegetation. This ensures good consistency between the emissions of greenhouse gases, reactive gases, and aerosol particles and their precursors. Air quality describes the composition of the atmosphere from gases and particles near the Earth's surface. Local emissions from different sources (e.g. energy production, industrial production, traffic) cause changes to the atmospheric composition that are highly variable in space and time. The quality of the air we breathe can significantly impact our health and the environment. Therefore, it is highly relevant to monitor air quality and emissions. EO satellites are capable of monitoring aerosols, tropospheric O3, tropospheric NO2, CO, HCHO, SO2, and particulate matter (of the sizes PM 2.5 and PM 10). Products like air quality assessment reports, daily ozone forecasts, and UV-index forecast maps are produced that are applied in specific use cases, particularly related to health. The amount of solar radiation that arrives at a location on the Earth surface depends on the atmosphere composition and varies over the day and the seasons. Information on solar radiation is useful in various domains. Applications of sunlight and ozone data are for example real-time UV radiation forecasting and risk assessment, skin health services, climate change studies, assessment of ozone protection policies effectiveness, plant growth and disease control, evaporation and irrigation models, power generation, solar heating systems planning and monitoring.
Analyse atmospheric EO measurements
Compare human-induced emissions to natural sources
Use EO products to forecast sunlight exposure
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