AURORA

This project has ended |  -

Advanced Ultraviolet Radiation and Ozone Retrieval for Applications (AURORA) is a project funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 687428).

Project objectives:

The primary objective of AURORA is to explore new ways of exploiting the complementary measurement capabilities of the instruments on board the Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 missions of Copernicus, operating on Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and on Low Earth Orbit (LEO) respectively, for near real-time monitoring of the ozone vertical profile with unprecedented accuracy. A combination of data fusion and data assimilation will be used to maximise the synergy of ozone products - retrieved from the LEO and GEO measurements in different spectral regions - in the resulting global ozone analyses and forecasts. Tropospheric ozone and UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface will be also derived from the global fields. These additional products could potentially be exploited in a variety of downstream applications, two of which (UV dosimetry, and air quality prediction and monitoring in major cities and at regional scale) are envisaged and will be developed within the project as demonstration of the potential usage of the AURORA products. As the project will end before the launch of the Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5, all activities will be based on the use of simulated data.

ECMWF's contribution:

The ECMWF's contribution to AURORA covers the following main areas:

  • Creation of the atmospheric scenarios that will be used to simulate the Sentinel-4 and -5 observations (Work Package 3).
  • Production of global ozone analyses and forecasts that will be used for the calculation of the tropospheric ozone products and surface UV-index (Work Package 4).
  • Contribution to the development and testing of the whole data processing chain (Work Package 4).
  • Interface to the Copernicus Climate Change Service and Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Work Package 8).

More details can be found on the main project website: http://www.aurora-copernicus.eu/