EUMETSAT efforts to establish the European (NRT) satellite constellation for aerosol & fire monitoring. Current status and upcoming developments with Sentinel-3 and MTG.

Since 2014, EUMETSAT is leading the establishment for the European Near Real Time (NRT) and operational satellite constellation dedicated to the monitoring of aerosols and some of their sources, like wildfires. On top of that, EUMETSAT is developing the Level-2 (L2) NRT satellite Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) products and intensively works with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to prepare the future operational assimilation by the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS).

Our presentation will focus on the current status of the NRT aerosol products from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission, the challenges, and their evolution. It will notably address the current quality of the AOD data from the Collection 3 as derived and operationally disseminated by EUMETSAT from the Optimized Simultaneous Surface Aerosol Retrieval (OSSAR-CS3) processing chain, the planned evolution with the Day-2/Day-3 developments with notably the NRT SYNergy items, and also the new Aerosol Layer Height (ALH) developments under preparation from the O2-A Sentinel-3 bands.

The NRT Aerosol products are jointly produced with the NRT Fire Radiative Power products from Sentinel-3, hence providing key information on some important aerosol emission sources. Consistency across these two datasets will be addressed. These products provide the foundation of the upcoming NRT aerosol and fire developments under preparation for the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) instrument onboard the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) platform.