AURORA Project: Main Achievements from Science, through Technology, to Applications

A substantial leap in our capability to monitor atmospheric composition from space is taking place with the new generation of satellite missions devoted to the study of air quality, climate change, stratospheric ozone and UV radiation reaching the Earth's surface. The need to meet increasingly demanding observation requirements is leading to the deployment of space-borne instruments offering groundbreaking levels of performance. Moreover, the growing number of payloads on board already operating or planned low Earth orbit and geostationary platforms is making complementary information available on a wealth of key targets retrieved from observations at different frequencies and with different viewing geometries. Optimal exploitation of the information contained in temporally and spatially collocated datasets from multiple measurement sources is, therefore, the key opportunity and challenge characterizing this novel scenario. In the context of the Horizon 2020 framework program of the European Union, the AURORA (Advanced Ultraviolet Radiation and Ozone Retrieval for Applications) project was precisely designed to respond to this quest by investigating the potential of synergistic use of independent measurements of an atmospheric variable by sequential application of an innovative data fusion method and data assimilation systems. The focus of the study has been on the vertical distribution of atmospheric Ozone for more than one reason. On the one hand, Ozone is a key atmospheric compound playing different roles at different altitudes; on the other, being observable in several bands of the spectrum, is among the trace gases that can mostly benefit of data synergy. The investigation was conducted using simulated data of the atmospheric Sentinel missions of the Copernicus Program (i.e., Ultraviolet and Visible measurements of the UVN and UVNS spectrometers of Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5, respectively, as well as Thermal Infrared observations of IASI-NG on MSG and IRS on MTG). The presentation will describe the main achievements of the project: oby retracing the journey across the scientific challenges of the design and implementation of the AURORA data processing chain; oby highlighting the need to realize a technological infrastructure capable to run the end-to-end process from the inputs of synthetic Ozone data by multiple sources to the output a unique Ozone profile estimate; oby illustrating the outcome of application-oriented activities intended to demonstrate the use of tropospheric ozone and UV surface radiation products calculated in AURORA in new applications for air quality monitoring and forecasting at urban scale and for personal UV dosimetry, respectively.