Solar light acquired by satellites at the top of our atmosphere allow to estimate the amount of gaseous pollutants and green-house gaseous, their distribution and their variability all over the world. Their detailed million spectra features contain information of every molecule in the atmosphere.
But combined with ground-based stations, they form then a powerful network to monitor all the global sources and sinks of these pollutants, distinguish man-made from nature activities and at the end depict the general changes of the air that we breathe.
2 very nice videos explain, in a simple way, how these instruments help us:
- Dr. Pieternel Levelt, from GRS (TU Delft) and KNMI, talk here about the Dutch-Finnish OMI satellite mission and the future of air quality sensors
- and our colleagues researchers at the University of Bremen explain, here in this special edition of Space Euronews video, the challenge of carbon and other atmospheric pollutant measurements.
And both videos emphasize the forthcoming new Dutch TROPOMI mission, on-bard the ESA Sentinel-5 Precursor platform. Its launch is expected in a very near future by all of us!
Homepage Julien Chimot: a journey in Earth observation satellite science 