SENTINEL-5 PRECURSOR – COVID-19 Impact Monitoring from Space

Abstract:

The Sentinel-5 Precursor mission, launched on Oct. 13 2017, is the first atmospheric Sentinel and supports Copernicus services in particular for atmospheric applications, including activities such as air quality, ozone and climate monitoring. The instrument TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument) is the single payload of the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite and was co-funded by ESA and The Netherlands. Algorithm development is co-funded by Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. Sentinel-5 Precursor ensures on the one hand continuity of atmospheric satellite data provision from the ESA ERS (GOME), ENVISAT (SCIAMACHY), and the USA EOS-AURA (OMI) missions in the various application and scientific domains and prepares on the other hand for the future atmospheric Copernicus Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 instruments hosted on EUMETSAT platforms. This AGU contribution focuses on using Sentinel-5P measurements to assess the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown and the subsequent economic recovery. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly across the world and has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In order to curb the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, countries across the world have been implementing various social distancing measures restricting people’s movements by placing cities and even entire countries on lockdown. Earth observing satellites like the TROPOMI instrument on the Copernicus Sentinel-5P are being used to map air pollution worldwide and have revealed a significant drop in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations – coinciding with the strict quarantine measures which cause less emissions of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide due to reduced traffic and industrial activities. Beside nitrogen dioxide also results of COVID-19 restrictions on methane and sulfur dioxide concentrations as measured by Sentinel-5P over selected areas are presented.