Assistant professor Efstratios Bourtsoukidis and PhD student Emeric Germain-Paulienne are joining The Cyprus Institute and CAO this January. Their research will focus on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – a new domain of study for CAO.
The laboratory container for Troodos station was delivered and secured on Friday the 13th of November 2020. State of the art atmospheric composition measuring instruments will soon follow!
PhD student Yunsong Liu and technical research specialist Pierre-Yves Quehe have been measuring carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) concentrations all over Cyprus using a high-end PICARRO instrument, onboard the institute’s car, to better assess regional and local GHG fluxes.
As of August 31st 2019, TCCON Nicosia has been added to the OCO-2/OCO-3 target sites for the validation of their mission. An example of a target observation can be seen in Figure 1. The comparison of OCO-2 with TCCON shows if the former’s retrievals are biased against the ground based reference network.
CAO and USRL have worked together to integrate ozonesondes, usually tethered to stratospheric balloons, into UAVs for vertical and horizontal mapping of ozone concentrations. Early tests have shown the ability to follow the morning boundary layer shift as well as detecting stratospheric ozone intrusions.
As part of the ACTRIS Community / IMP Kick-Off Meeting taking place in Larnaca (Mar 2-6 2020), the community of European scientists visited CAO Agia Marina Xyliatou station. Director Prof Jean Sciare, associate research scientist Dr Michael Pikridas and postdoctoral fellow Dr Florin Unga presented the team and activities carried out by CAO.
Research assistant Ms. Maria Kezoudi visited ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, to be trained on the use of the COBALD instrument to be deployed during the ASKOS campaign (June/July 2020). As principal investigator for the Cyprus Institute at ASKOS, Maria also gave a seminar of the CAO’s participation to ASKOS.
Technical research specialist Mr. Pierre-Yves Quehe joined a LSCE AirCore campaign in Orleans, France, to be trained on the use of AirCore sampling and analysis. In the coming months, this sampling method will be used by CAO to retrieve vertical profiles of greenhouse gases for validation of the TCCON instrument.