Mission of the project

Perform engineering and scientific tasks in order to support the Pandonia Global Network (PGN) for Copernicus Mission Calibration and Validation activities.

The pressing issues of air quality and global warming are fundamentally determined by the amount of aerosols and trace gasses in the atmosphere. Therefore their abundances are measured from ground- and space-based platforms. 

Several existing and upcoming EO satellite missions retrieve the column amount of atmospheric trace gasses such as O3, NO2, SO2, HCHO, CO2, CH4, H2O, etc.  Several of them are EUMETSAT Copernicus Atmospheric Composition missions to be supported within this project. 

In order to ensure the quality of these satellite products, they need to be validated against independent measurements. The backbone of satellite validation efforts is in general data coming from well-maintained ground-based remote sensing networks such as the Pandonia Global Network (PGN) for reactive trace gas retrievals using Pandora spectrometer systems (Pandora). 

The proposed “Copernicus Support to the Pandonia Global Network - Algorithm, Monitoring & Analysis” or short “PanAMA” is based on three activities: