Establishment of the Pandora Asia Network and validation of GEMS

The Pandora spectrometer is a valuable tool for air quality monitoring and satellite validation. From 2020 to 2024, the National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER), in collaboration with the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), the Korea Environment Corporation (KECO), and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), successfully established the Pandora Asia Network (PAN) by installing 20 Pandora instruments within the field of view of the Geostationary Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS). These units were installed four in Thailand, three in Indonesia, three in Mongolia, two in Laos, four in the Philippines, three in Vietnam, and one in Cambodia. PAN could provide long-term data to validate GEMS data for Southeast Asia, along with the Pandora instruments installed in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia. The comparison results showed a high correlation between GEMS and Pandora. NIER plans to process PAN data in near-real time and provide comparison figures with GEMS, offering greater convenience to GEMS data users. This is expected to contribute not only to GEMS validation but also to monitoring air pollution in the Asian region.