Fresh air in the 21st century?

Ozone is an air quality problem today for much of the world's population. Regions can exceed the ozone air quality standards (AQS) through a combination of local emissions, meteorology favoring pollution episodes, and the clean-air baseline levels of ozone upon which pollution builds. The IPCC 2001 assessment studied a range of global emission scenarios and found that all but one projects increases in global tropospheric ozone during the 21st century. By 2030, near-surface increases over much of the northern hemisphere are estimated to be about 5 ppb (+2 to +7 ppb over the range of scenarios). By 2100 the two more extreme scenarios project baseline ozone increases of >20 ppb, while the other four scenarios give changes of -4 to +10 ppb. Even modest increases in the background abundance of tropospheric ozone might defeat current AQS strategies. The larger increases, however, would gravely threaten both urban and rural air quality over most of the northern hemisphere

CAMP@FLASH: an end-station for imaging, electron- and ion-spectroscopy, and pump–probe experiments at the FLASH free-electron laser

The non-monochromatic beamline BL1 at the FLASH free-electron laser facility at DESY was upgraded with new transport and focusing optics, and a new permanent end-station, CAMP, was installed. This multi-purpose instrument is optimized for electron- and ion-spectroscopy, imaging and pump–probe experiments at free-electron lasers. It can be equipped with various electron- and ion-spectrometers, along with large-area single-photon-counting pnCCD X-ray detectors, thus enabling a wide range of experiments from atomic, molecular, and cluster physics to material and energy science, chemistry and biology. Here, an overview of the layout, the beam transport and focusing capabilities, and the experimental possibilities of this new end-station are presented, as well as results from its commissioning

ESA's Atmospheric Chemistry Mission - A Status Report

The challenges in understanding the atmospheric chemistry processes for climate research and to model and forecast the air quality on regional scale are still manifold. Presently, ESA is providing atmospheric chemistry data both from their core missions ERS-2 and Envisat as well as from Third Party Missions (TPM). ESAs core atmospheric chemistry instruments onboard ERS-2 and ENVISAT are GOME, GOMOS, MIPAS and SCIAMACHY. With ERS-2 launched in 1995 and ENVISAT in 2002, these instruments are providing a rich dataset to the scientific community and supporting operational services since more than 14 years. Currently, data from the following missions can be provided through ESA: ACE-FTS and MAESTRO data from the CSA SCISAT mission, OSIRIS and SMR data from the SSC ODIN mission, TANSO-FTS AND -CAI data from the JAXA/NIES/MOE GOSAT mission. It is currently planned that also OMI data from the NASA AURA mission will be accessible through ESA. In addition to the operational data, ESA acknowledges that the science community is developing and providing a number of important, quality products based on ESA missions. The presentation will summarise the status of all the issues addressed above with a focus on ESA instruments, algorithm development and data distribution