Sentinel-5P data for studying air pollutants: soon available for Switzerland

The Swiss Data Cube team, in collaboration with the Institute of Global Health and the Institute for Environmental Sciences of the University of Geneva, has started working in ingesting Level 2 data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite (a mission dedicated to monitoring air pollution). It is a mission dedicated to monitoring air pollution. We will daily ingest data starting from July 2018 onwards to track to ozone, methane, formaldehyde, aerosol, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere.

As exemplified during the Coronavirus lockdown in China, Northern Italy, or Europe, reduced economic activities can drastically decrease the concentrations of atmospheric polluants. Our project will help assessing and quantifying this decrease over Switzerland, with a strong public health angle to understand if this decrease might have had a positive impact on the morbidity associated to air-quality related respiratory diseases.