Autumn School in Crete - IRISCC project

The IRISCC onsite autumn school Climate risks data analysis & methods took place from 14 to 18 September 2026 in Chania, Greece, bringing together early-career researchers for a week of hands-on work on climate risk data.

Among the demonstrators presented, Demonstrator 6 on wildfire emissions is coordinated by ACTRIS. For the school, a dedicated service was developed as a Virtual Research Environment on the D4Science platform, bringing together analysis notebooks from three environmental research infrastructures (ACTRIS, IAGOS and ICOS) alongside FLEXPART model output, within a single interface and a common way of working.

Students used the VRE to investigate a real case: the 2025 Canadian wildfire season and the transport of its smoke plume across the Atlantic to Europe. Working in small teams, they combined aerosol lidar profiles, ground-based in-situ measurements and trace gas records with CO profiles measured by instruments on commercial aircraft, following the plume from its arrival over Europe down to the surface.

The exercise showed the practical value of combining observations from several research infrastructures: no single instrument captures the whole picture, and learning where they agree — and where they do not — is part of the scientific work.