| Description |
IAGOS is setting up a network of commercial aircraft that will carry out observations of atmospheric composition on a scale that would be impossible to achieve using research aircraft.
IAGOS, the 'In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System' project, aims at establishing a sustainable distributed research infrastructure for the global observation of atmospheric composition. It is setting up a network of commercial aircraft that will carry out observations on a scale and in numbers that would be impossible to achieve using research aircraft and for which other measurement methods (e.g. satellites) have technical limitations.
The Research Infrastructure project was identified in the roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in 2006. The EU supported IAGOS in its design phase and its preparatory phase, which focused on the development of a set of special instruments for measurement and data transmission.
A number of European and international airlines have joined the project to fit their passenger aircraft with IAGOS instru-mentation, and several more are about to get involved. In a first phase, 10 to 20 long-range aircraft of internationally operating airlines will be equipped. The infrastructure will enable long-term observations of atmospheric composition, aerosol and cloud particles on a global scale.
How?
IAGOS deploys newly developed high-tech instruments for regular in situ measurements of atmospheric chemical species (O3, CO, CO2, CH4, NOx, NOy, H2O) 1 , aerosols and cloud particles. The data will be available in near real-time to weather services, GMES 2 service centres and atmospheric scientists around the world. |