PIs: Nikolaos Evangeliou – Sabine Eckhardt – Cristine Groot Zwaaftink
NILU is a Norwegian, non profit and independent climate and environmental research institute founded in 1969. It started as an institute for air research but have now expanded to research almost all aspects of how people, climate, and the environment affect each other. NILU’s goal is to attain a better quality of life for everyone! It contributes to this through research into the composition of the atmosphere, climate change, air quality, environmental toxins, health effects, sustainable systems, circular economy, and digitalization.
NILU began studying long-range transport of pollution in the early 1970s. This research subsequently resulted in the international Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). The convention includes several agreements on emission reductions. Under a related agreement, the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP), NILU is responsible for the Chemical Coordinating Centre of EMEP, which coordinates all measurements of long-range air pollution in Europe. NILU has played key advisory roles in national and international processes for organisations such as WMO, AMAP, EEA and others.
In addition to doing traditional research on greenhouse gases and air pollutants, we study the climate system itself (including meteorology and how surface properties affect the atmosphere). We also do research on the dispersal of volcanic ash and radionuclides. Our scientists use observational data and models to study emissions, dispersion, transformation and deposition on regional and global scales. We also maintain open databases in which observations from monitoring stations all over the world are freely available.
At Atmospheric and Climate Research (ATMOS) department, we develop and maintain a series of modeling algorithms, namely the Lagrangian Particle Dispersion model FLEXPART (https://www.flexpart.eu), the Bayesian inversion framework FLEXINVERT (https://flexinvert.nilu.no/home/) and FLEXDUST (https://folk.nilu.no/~christine/dust.html).
For the CHOPIN Campaign, we provide daily forecasts of <2.5, 2.5-10 and >10 um dust for the next seven days in the future at 3-hourly resolution (0.5×0.5) using emissions calculated with the FLEXDUST model. The forecasts are updated every day and given through https://atmo-access.nilu.no/FWD_FCAST_DUST_CLEANCLOUD.py