COVID-19 aerosol lidar NRT campaign

The EARLINET/ACTRIS intensive campaign is organized as part of the ACTRIS initiative for studying the changes in the atmosphere during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The scope of the campaign is twofold:

a) to monitor the atmosphere’s structure during the lockdown and early relaxation period in Europe;   

b) to identify possible changes due to decreased emissions, by comparison to the aerosol climatology in Europe.

During the entire month of May, aerosol lidars will measure at least two-times per day, and data will be processed by the Single Calculus Chain in a centralized hub. In order to test the NRT capabilities, data will be available in max. 12h after the end of each measurement. More than 20 EARLINET/ACTRIS lidar stations are participating to this experiment, out of which 7 are automatic, continuous operating systems. The analysis of this preliminary data will be reported weekly to ACTRIS, Copernicus, the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT, but also to relevant stakeholders at national level.

This campaign is also a good opportunity for testing and optimizing the workflows between the future ACTRIS Aerosol Remote Sensing NFs, the ACTRIS Topical Centre for Aerosol Remote Sensing (CARS) and the Aerosol Remote Sensing Unit at the ACTRIS Data Centre (ARES).

Go to the weekly reports here

Check the daily quicklooks at: https://quicklooks.earlinet.org/

Lidar stations providing measurements of the aerosol profiles daily:
a) in yellow, stations measuring 2 times per day;
b) in red, stations providing continuous measurements