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Animation of PM10 levels over Europe. Source: ECMWF Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the two services implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) are helping researchers, policymakers and citizens alike with open and quality assured data about our climate and atmosphere.

CAMS has launched a microsite to provide updated air quality information on a daily and weekly basis. This site includes maps, time series and animations of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and fine particulate matter (PM10) for 50 major European cities. Based on satellites, ground observations and state-of-art numerical models, CAMS’s monitoring of the atmosphere makes it possible to see what are the current levels of air pollution across Europe, including the effects of lockdown measures against COVID-19 on air quality. This is quite complex, as there are large expected variations in surface concentrations of pollutants due to continual changes in weather and in many sources of emissions that are still active. Nevertheless, CAMS has already detected a reduction of NO2 levels over Northern Italy since the lockdown. Furthermore, CAMS is looking into other effects that air pollution might have on COVID-19.

“At present, it is not established that air pollution is playing a role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2”, comments Vincent-Henri Peuch, Director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. “However, it is established that air pollution does affect cardio-pulmonary health and immune response. Additionally, we are looking to expand our network of collaborations with medical research teams interested in testing hypotheses about the potential transport and survival of the virus on fine particulate matter in suspension in air.”

Meanwhile, C3S has worked with the environmental software experts B-Open to develop an application in its freely accessible Climate Data Store (CDS) to demonstrate the possibilities that Copernicus data offers to researchers like epidemiologists and health experts, in dealing with COVID-19: the Monthly Climate Explorer for COVID-19 app.* Outbreaks of viral diseases  often show a marked seasonal cycle, which has led some researchers to the hypothesis that COVID-19 might show a similar pattern. C3S provides historical data on temperature, humidity, and UV radiation at ground level, as well as many other climate variables, from the global reanalysis ERA5. This environmental data can be used by researchers to test the climate determinants hypothesis and explore the claims that temperature and humidity could affect the spread of COVID-19.**

“C3S data supports society by providing authoritative information about the past, present and future climate in Europe and the rest of the world”, says Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “We offer tools and expert guidance that make it possible to transform our data into more visual products, such as maps and charts. The new COVID-19 Monthly Climate Explorer application in the CDS endeavours to demonstrate the broad potential of our data and show how users can employ C3S environmental data for their own fundamental research.”

C3S provides historic, current and future data on temperature and humidity up to a resolution of 12 kilometres over land. In mid-March, the service asked B-Open to develop an application that can map this data against the locations of COVID-19 deaths for January, February and March 2020 provided by Johns Hopkins University. The application also shows how temperature and humidity around the world are likely to change over the next few months based on C3S data dating back twenty years. This enables it to be used to identify where conditions that are climatically suitable or unsuitable for the spread of coronavirus are likely to arise in the near future.

More about CAMS’ COVID-19 monitoring and further information will be available on the website: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/european-air-quality-information-support-covid-19-crisis

The Monthly Climate Explorer for COVID-19 can be accessed here: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/apps/c3s/app-c3s-monthly-climate-covid-19-explorer

More information about the help C3S is providing researchers here:

https://climate.copernicus.eu/coronavirus-and-climate-c3s-helps-health-experts

* More information, references and methodological details are available in the relevant CDS catalogue entry that you can find here: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/software/app-c3s-monthly-climate-covid-19-explorer?tab=overview

**Papers already using C3S data (ERA5 dataset): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3550308&fbclid=IwAR0_seUsjZInP0goCsZK2ABxFgbErJOKaKRFuBZxpwWPPTsgNiMzv6EsCUQ

http://www.kylemeng.com/research?fbclid=IwAR274UZ_kaTh3h-LBuO-R3rrI5uExDvFl6gXwQzoUvnt-M-E-7ITQzCVmI