Monitor the atmosphere and climate includes all change-focused services/applications which assess, monitor, forecast and provide timely, continuous and independent data (e.g. temperature, humidity, emissions, greenhouse gases, solar UV radiation, aorosols,...). It closely monitors each of the Earth's different subsystems and, besides being the basis for weather forecasts, helps to better understand and evaluate the impact of the climate change.
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.
Monitoring the climate includes monitoring climate forcing and the carbon balance and assessing climate change risks.
Climate forcing describes the imbalance of the Earth’s energy budget due to natural or human-induced sources. This imbalance results in a change in the globally-averaged temperature. Amongst the contributors of positive climate forcing, that leads to an increase in the globally-averaged temperature, the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmospheric composition is considered to be the most important factor. Changes in the carbon dioxide concentration indicate that the exchanges between carbon sources and sinks are not balanced. It can be shown that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for the increase of the carbon dioxide since the industrialisation.
With EO, we can monitor changes in greenhouse gases (GHG), aeorosols, albedo, and solar radiation. The dynamic nature of the climate makes it necessary to apply equally dynamic EO monitoring that allows to deliver key information on historical, seasonal forecast and projection periods for climate-related indicators.
Relevant EO products include estimates of the climate forcing of aerosol, ozone and greenhouse gases. The dynamic nature of the climate makes it necessary to apply equally dynamic EO monitoring that allows to deliver key information on historical, seasonal forecast and projection periods for climate-related indicators.
The products are particularly relevant to the European energy sector in terms of electricity demand and the production of power from wind, solar and hydro sources.
Moreover, water management uses EO-derived information about climate change to mitigate effects of changing precipitation patterns to adapt their strategies, and to prepare for climate variability and change in the water sector, e.g. because of changes in river discharge, droughts and floods.
Finally, insurance uses climate change information for assessing the weather risks to insured assets that change with the climate-related increase in extreme weather conditions. This includes products like up-to-date catalogue of wind storms and their associated impacts on the ground.