Opening & New Missions

Pollution in the atmosphere now spans all scales from the local to the global.  Air quality, stratospheric ozone and climate change are all being influenced by anthropogenic activity. This is a result of the increasing population, which has risen from 1 Billion at the industrial revolution to 7.6 Billion presently The earth system has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. To understand the impact of anthropogenic activity and natural phenomena, global measurements of atmospheric trace constituents are required at adequate spectral resolution and temporal sampling.  

The SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption spectrometer for Atmospheric CHartographY) project, which began in 1984, addressed the objective of measuring trace gases, aerosols and clouds from space based passive remote sensing in the solar spectral range.  This initiative led to the following instruments being developed and launched on satellite platforms into sun synchronous low earth orbit: GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment - ESA ERS-2 1995-2011), SCIAMACHY (ESA Envisat 2002 to 2012) GOME_2 (EUMTSAT Metop A 2006 to present, Metop B 2012 to present, Metop C to be launched in late 2018). In addition, the spin off OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument - NASA AURA 2004 to present) was developed by NSO/NASA and ESA/NSO recently developed Sentinel 5 Precursor (2017 –present). Sentinel 4, which builds on the heritage of SCIAMACHY and the GeoSCIA proposals will be launched as part of MTG-2(2021-2037) and Sentinel 5 as part of the Metop Second Generation (2021- 2036).  SCIAMACHY had the widest spectral range 210 to 2038 nm.  GOME, GOME-2 and Sentinel 4 observe in the UV, Visible NIR and OMI in the UV and Visible. Appropriate mathematical inversion of the measurements of these instruments yields information about the total stratospheric and tropospheric column amounts and distributions of the following gases, which are either short lived climate pollutants or greenhouse gases: O3, NO2, H2O, HCHO, CHO.CHO, BrO, IO, CO, CH4 and CO2.   

The status of the evolving observing system is that the spectral resolution has now reached at best approximately 25 km² once a day. This presentation will provide an analysis of needs for the evolving earth observing system, and update on the analysis at the University of Bremen of the time series provided by the above instruments. Finally, it will address opportunities for New Space developments of small satellites.

The Sentinel-5 Precursor mission, launched on Oct. 13 2017, is the first atmospheric Sentinel and supports Copernicus services in particular for atmospheric applications, including activities such as air quality, ozone and climate monitoring. The instrument TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument) is the single payload of the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite and was co-funded by The Netherlands. Sentinel-5 Precursor ensures on the one hand continuity of atmospheric satellite data provision from the ESA ERS (GOME), ENVISAT (SCIAMACHY), and the USA EOS-AURA (OMI) missions in the various application and scientific domains and prepares on the other hand for the future atmospheric Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 instruments hosted on EUMETSAT platforms. The Sentinel-5 Precursor Commissioning Phase was successfully finalised on April 24 2018. Since then the mission is in the so-called ramp-up phase with a planned duration of 8 months. During this phase the Sentinel-5 Precursor products are being released to the public in a staggered approach and the Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS) services are gradually upgraded to reach full operations capacity. This presentation provides on overview about the Sentinel-5 Precursor mission status and its products.

Welcome address - opening

Presentation

Opening

Presentation