ESA Releases Satellite Aerosol Data Set
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today that it now has released a 12-year long data set of observations of global aerosols. The project is aptly named GlobAerosol. It uses data from the Along Track Scanning Radiometer-2 on the ERS-2 satellite, the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) and the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MeRIS) on Envisat and the Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on the Meteosat Second Generation. Aerosols are important in the modeling of global climate change because “they scatter and absorb sunlight and infrared emission from Earth’s surface, and act as condensation nuclei for the formation of cloud droplets.” Learn more about this online here.