The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service: Supporting Air Quality Applications Worldwide

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is part of the European Union's flagship space programme Copernicus. CAMS is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) together with a network of 60 entities distributed in 20 European countries: it is thus a truly international and collaborative effort. CAMS delivers operationally a wide range of information products and services on air quality, surface fluxes, solar radiation and climate forcings. All CAMS atmospheric composition outputs are unrestricted and provided free-of-charge to users worldwide. The CAMS global forecasting system is using ECMWF's Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), which is used successfully for Numerical Weather Prediction and has been extended with modules for atmospheric chemistry, aerosols and greenhouse gases.

The CAMS system assimilates observations from more than 60 satellite sensors to constrain both the meteorology and the atmospheric composition species. While an operational forecasting system needs to be robust and reliable, it also needs continual R&D efforts in order to provide the best possible analyses and forecasts and keep up with the state-of-the-art. We will present some of our current efforts on model developments an on improving the 4D-Var data assimilation for satellite observations of atmospheric composition.

Finally, various applications and uses of our products and outputs will be presented in order to illustrate the current user base of CAMS: several thousands worldwide, with about one thousand relying on the daily operational Near-Real-Time forecasts. We will cover air quality aspects in Europe (focusing in particular on “policy” uses), but we’ll also showcase how the global CAMS outputs are used in other parts of the world to support local air quality applications especially in the context of WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch programme. We’ll especially mention the CAMS global system capabilities for representing accurately the long-range transport of large wildfire, dust and volcanic plumes.