Publié le 25 juin 2020
How bad is the air pollution in your area? What can we expect now countries are slowly emerging from their lockdowns? We’ve seen nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations reduce significantly during the global quarantine. However, the ultimate goal should be to improve air quality on the long term: for the wellbeing of generations to come and to avert catastrophic climate effects.
Animation of NO2 concentrations over western Europe for December 2019 – May 2020. Concentrations increase from white – yellow – red. Grey areas indicate that insufficient high-quality NO2 observations over the respective month could be collected due to persistent cloud
“Even in the post-Corona virus era, climate change will remain the largest systemic global risk of the 21st century”, stated by Joseph Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes at the European Space Agency in a recent interview. Thanks to research done during the past decades, we are now able to monitor air quality on a daily basis. Let’s take a look at how satellite data and remote sensing technology support us towards cleaner air for our future on a global, but also regional scale, such as western Europe.