The use of Sentinel-5P air quality data by CAMS
Inness, Antje ; Ribas, Roberto ; Engelen, Richard
Air pollution is a global public health risk. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.2 million people worldwide, including hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, die prematurely each year because of poor ambient air quality and that 91% of the world's population live in areas where air quality fails to meet WHO guidelines. It is therefore important to provide air quality forecasts on global, regional and local scales to support public health authorities and policy-makers and to enable vulnerable people to take preventative action during pollution episodes. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union, provides services related to atmospheric pollution on the global and European scale, combining information from models and observations to enable a continuous assessment of the air we breathe. For its global forecasting system, CAMS uses a wide range of atmospheric composition observations from satellites to improve the initial conditions for its daily 5-day forecasts. The latest satellite to provide such data for CAMS is Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P). S5P was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in October 2017 and is the first satellite mission in Europe's Copernicus Earth observation programme to be dedicated to monitoring atmospheric composition. Tests carried out at ECMWF show that the use of S5P data on ozone and carbon monoxide improves the CAMS analysis of atmospheric composition, which is produced using ECMWF's Integrated Forecasting System (IFS). S5P ozone data are now assimilated operationally by CAMS, and the assimilation of other S5P species is expected to follow later in 2019.
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