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Ammonia (NH3) is an air pollutant mainly emitted from the agriculture sector with an increasing part from traffic that is highly uncertain in urban areas. NH3 is a highly reactive gas capable of forming fine particulate matter which are harmful for human health. Monitoring NH3 is therefore essential, especially in urban areas such as in […]
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Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in improving the monitoring of the Earth’s atmosphere and our understanding of the impact that human activities have on air pollution. IASI/Metop is one of these satellite instruments capable of mapping the chemical composition of the atmosphere globally and in near-real time. In a recent study, […]
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In the boreal spring of 2020, worldwide measures for curbing the spread of the COVID-19 virus have led to unprecedented and abrupt lockdowns in transportation and industry. They have led to sharp decrease of emissions of anthropogenic pollutants that induced significant changes in the composition of the atmosphere from city to hemispheric scale. Using an […]
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Bouillon et al. (2022) recently designed a neural network to retrieve atmospheric temperatures from the IASI radiance data. This new temperature data record is validated against other datasets and a good agreement is shown. Trends were computed from this new temperature dataset over the 2008–2020 period. A general warming of the troposphere, more important at […]
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Human survivability in hot regions does not depend only on temperature, but also on humidity levels in ambient air. In fact, the body’s ability to shed heat is diminished when the air around it is saturated with humidity. The wet bulb temperature (also called heat stress) is the temperature of the air when it is […]
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By analyzing the changes in the spectrally resolved Earth’s Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) from 10 years of daily IASI observations, Whitburn et al. (2021) have highlighted the impact of large climate phenomena (in particular El Niño) on the surface and atmospheric temperature and atmospheric composition. More interesting from a longer-term climate monitoring perspective, they were […]
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While sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) events are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, Safieddine et al. (2020) investigated the rare SSW event in the Southern Hemisphere that occurred in 2019 using satellite and ground-based station data. They demonstrated the ability of the IASI instruments to detect simultaneously the stratospheric warming and the evolution of the […]
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The Paris megacity faces frequent fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution episodes in spring. At this period of the year, large numbers of the particles consist of ammonium sulfate and nitrate which are formed from ammonia (NH3) released during fertilizer spreading practices and transported from the surrounding areas to Paris. However, there is still limited knowledge […]
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Formic (HCOOH) and acetic (CH3COOH) acids are the most abundant carboxylic acids in the Earth’s atmosphere and contribute to the acidity of rainwater and cloud. Current knowledge is however unable to explain their elevated concentration levels measured in the atmosphere since their sources remain poorly known and quantified. The first measurements of acetic acid atmospheric […]
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A high-resolution map (~1km²) of the global atmospheric distribution of ammonia was generated combining almost a decade of IASI measurements (Van Damme et al., 2018). From it, they identify, categorize and quantify over 200 hotspots that could be traced back to either a single or a cluster of agricultural and industrial point sources. One natural […]