Our second ECR seminar, hosted on 23rd of January, 2025, began with Prince Junior Asilevi, from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, explaining the NO2 meteorology and predictability over West Africa using TROPOMI. Asilevi explained the challenges of in-situ NO2 monitoring in the region, and gave some insights into how to estimate NO2 concentrations from local climatology, assuming source stationarity. He works with satellite data (TROPOMI), meteorological parameters (NASA POWER), and local seasonality index to estimate the seasonal variability of NO2 in Ghana. The results show an expected peak in regional and urban NO2 during dry season, in contrast to the rainy season, as a result of major local factors such as biomass burning. The data can potentially be refined with machine learning, and applied to other regions with similar in-situ monitoring challenges.
The second seminar speaker was Ariel Scagliotti, from Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, CNEA, Argentina, about uncertainties assessment in aerosol optical classification. He presented his work on evaluating associated errors with AOD retrieval, and explained the classifying uncertainties, relation with type of aerosol being measured, and misclassification rate patterns to minimize uncertainties. The results point to a relation with geographic location, biome, climate and type of aerosol under consideration, since all methods perform poorly with low AOD values. His results can help researchers to select the most suitable method for their work, and the classification can be potentially optimized with machine learning.
A big thank you and congratulations to both presenters for sharing their work with the IGAC ECR community! Both presentations ended with engaging discussions and informative Q&As. To find out more, check out the seminar recording below: