Final Report Summary - INGOS (Integrated non-CO2 Greenhouse gas Observing System)
Executive Summary:
InGOS was an international EU Infrastructure project with more than 200 participating scientists and staff members from 14 European countries. InGOS, the acronym for “Integrated non CO2 Greenhouse gas Observing System”, has developed a unique network in its scientific field of climate research. InGOS combined atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic research and focussed on the main non–CO2 greenhouse gases CH4, N2O, SF6 and halocarbons, and H2. The impact of InGOS is exceptional and based on the international and interdisciplinary character, which enables and support scientists in collaborating within a diverse consortium and to work “outside the box” of their own research field. For the first time a project included all relevant aspects to investigate climate change such as harmonization and intensive quality contraol of as well historical as actual data, long–term monitoring of relevant gas species on a European level, intercomparison of state–of–the–art measurement methods and development of new methods, provision of standards and standardized good–practise guidelines, combination and verification of several modelling techniques with remote sensing and measurement data, quantification of sources by using isotopes, or assessment of non–CO2 GHG budgets at spatial scales by eddy covariance and flux–gradient techniques. The combination of these very different fields of natural sciences in one infrastructure project allowed establishing an overall picture of non–CO2 greenhouse gas emissions over Europe. InGOS successfully reach its initial objectives, in particular InGOS has:
- Harmonized and standardized historical and actual European NCGHGs measurements by quality check and developing common QC/QA procedures
- Improved NCGHG flux measurements and linked European flux towers to the atmospheric observational network
- Improved measurement methods by testing&developing new innovative techniques and strategies
- Tested advanced isotope techniques for application in the network and enabled attribution of the atmospheric fractions to source categories
- Integrated marine observations of the NCGHGs with land-based observations
- Supported further development of the European NCGHG network and integrated data for network evaluation by using sophisticated, high–resolution inverse modeling, data-assimilation methods and developments in bottom up inventories
- Linked the network to remote sensing data from in-situ and satellite observations
- Generated a public European non-CO2 GHG observation database
- Provided near-real time data of atmospheric CH4, N2O, SF6, and H2, and prepared data integration with the ICOS Research Infrastructure (Integrated Carbon Observation System), established as an ERIC in November 2015, to ensure operational, long–term monitoring perspectives
- Supported existing observation sites, transfer selected sites into supersites and provided access to key field stations and installations
- Expanded the current network with new stations in under sampled regions
- Stimulated atmospheric science knowledge transfer between experts and young scientists
With more than 300 dissimination activities, from wich up to now more than 150 peer–reviewed publications, InGOS creates significant output such as expertise and scientific advice, which could be used by policy makers.
InGOS made and make significant impact on many areas related to research and development, as well as the development of European environmental policies. InGOS supports informed decisions in climate change and international emission reduction protocols for non-CO2 greenhouse gases and research strategies, to respond to both the future political, societal and economic challenges and the development of scientific knowledge. Several scientists of the InGOS network were not only involved in the 5th IPCC report (2014) but also in the new UNEP/WMO Ozone Assessment for Decision-Makers (2015) and finally contributed to the successful 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21). The observation capabilities developed in InGOS allows independently verifying and also controlling the claimed emission reductions, and increasing the trust of the public and policy makers in the measures taken. Based on the excellent collaboration, the outcome and the need of such networks to scientifically support international climate relevant agreements (e.g.the Kyoto and the Montreal protocol or the new Paris agreement (COP-21)), the InGOS consortium expressed a clear commitment for a follow–up of the project.
Project Context and Objectives:
Project context: InGOS has been setup as an international infrastructure project to strengthen the European observation system of non–CO2 greenhouse gases. The human induced increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) since the industrial revolution is causing significant changes in Earth’s radiation balance. At present, the non-CO2 GHGs (NCGHG) contribute about 37% (0.97 Wm-2) of the global anthropogenic radiative forcing of all long-lived GHGs while 63% (1.66 Wm-2) is attributed to CO2. The increasing global atmospheric mixing ratios of CO2 and the most important NCGHGs (methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and halocarbons (with more than 40 different species) have been fairly well monitored by direct atmospheric observations. Systematic measurements of NCGHGs started in the 1980s, whereas CO2 measurements were already initiated in the 1950s at the South Pole and at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
Global monitoring of GHGs is performed by various research laboratories and national agencies (such as NOAA/ESRL). An important part of this network is coordinated within the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) program, and data are reported to the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases by GAW participants. Currently, a significant limitation of this database is, however, that different networks or institutes report their measurements on different calibration scales. The lack of a common calibration is very severe in particular for N2O, for which the standard measurement technique by gas chromatography exhibits a strong non-linearity, and comparison of measurements from different groups show significant offsets.
The emissions of NCGHG´s are very uncertain and it is unknown how future climate changes will feedback into the land use coupled emissions of CH4 and N2O. Nevertheless, the NCGHG atmospheric abundances will increase further in the future and the emissions of these gases are an attractive target for climate change mitigation policies. The monitoring of atmospheric GHGs with high accuracy and precision is essential to provide 'top-down' emission estimates, using inverse atmospheric transport models tracing back measured atmospheric mixing ratios to the regions where these GHGs were emitted.
Project objectives: InGOS aimed to support and integrate the observing capacity of Europe for NCGHG such as CH4, N2O, SF6, halocarbons, and also hydrogen (H2). InGOS aimed to improve the existing European observation system, which provide insight into the concentration levels and European and extra-European emissions of the NCGHGs. This allowed to detect the spatial and temporal distribution (hotspots) of the sources and changes in emissions due to mitigation and feedbacks with climate change. The data from the network enable to better constrain the emissions of NCGHGs within the EU and show whether emission reduction policies are effective. Thus, to strengthen the European observation system, the project had several objectives:
- Harmonization and standardization of historical and actual NCGHGs measurements in Europe by quality check and developing common QC/QA procedures
- Improvement of NCGHG flux measurements and linkage of European flux towers to the atmospheric observational network
- Improvement of measurement methods by testing and developing new innovative techniques and strategies
- Test advanced isotope techniques for application in the network to enable attribution of the atmospheric fractions to source categories
- Integrate and further integrate marine observations of the NCGHGs with land-based observations
- Support further development of the European NCGHG network and integrate data for network evaluation by using sophisticated, high–resolution inverse modeling, data-assimilation methods and developments in bottom up inventories
- Link the network to remote sensing data of column abundances from in-situ and satellite observations
- Generate a European non-CO2 GHG observation database, which will be made available to the scientific community and general public
- Provide near-real time access to the atmospheric CH4, N2O, SF6, and H2 data, and prepare data integration with the ICOS Research Infrastructure (Integrated Carbon Observation System) to ensure operational, long–term monitoring perspectives
- Support existing observation sites, transfer selected sites into supersites and provide access to key field stations and installations
- Provide capacity building in new member states and countries with inadequate existing infrastructure and expand the current network with new stations in under sampled regions
- Stimulate atmospheric science knowledge transfer between experts, and between experts and young scientists
The overall strategy to achieve the objectives of improved data quality, coverage and availability was based on strengthening (using network activities), outreach/cooperation (using trans-national access and service activities) and innovation (using joint research activities). These activities were divided into 18 work packages, which are executed by 37 partners all over Europe. The relatively large number of participants was needed to have proper coverage of the European domain and to enable harmonization across different scientific fields of marine, terrestrial and remote sensing research. TNAs were designed to open up almost all available sites in Europe for visiting researchers, from boreal Finland down to Mediterranean Spain or Cyprus.
The Networking Activities enhanced the quality of the services provided by the participating infrastructures within the InGOS network. The strategy to attain such progress comprised co-operation between the participants through expert workshops, improved Near-Real-Time (NRT) data availability for quality check of instrument functionality, ongoing comparison programs and campaigns, working out of good practice recommendations, and harmonization of the concentration measurements by enhancing the availability of reference gases calibrated on the respective WMO and AGAGE scales.
The TransNational Access Activities enabled users to conduct high-quality research by offering access to different infrastructures such as measurement towers, airborne flux platform, calibration service, and isotope analysis service. Parts of the TNAs were used for campaigns that were related to the NAs and JRAs and facilitated scientists both in and outside InGOS to join these activities.
The InGOS data center was a Service Activity that provided access to non-CO2 gas observations in Europe. This included near real time data to a wide audience as well as QA/QC controlled data for the international scientific community. The center was collocated with the CO2 data center foreseen in preparation for ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System), providing a solid base for the future ICOS data center.
The Joint Research Activities contributed to improvements of the InGOS infrastructure. This included evaluation of the potential benefits of new available state-of-the-art instruments, methods or techniques, e.g. novel in-situ FTIR, CRDS and remote sensing (DIAL) techniques, remotely sensed CH4, integration of NCGHG measurements on different spatial scales, new isotopologue instruments for CH4, instrumentation for halocarbon measurements, or tower measurements to specify the effects of regional fluxes versus effects from sources further upstream.
The objectives and their progress were subject of internal and external reviews to ensure a high quality level. In December 2013 the responsible EU Project Officer (PO) Anna–Maria Johansson and Prof. Wilfried Winiwarter as an external reviewer evaluated InGOS. In the executive summary it has been stated that “The InGOS project has demonstrated excellent progress in its first period” and that “Measuring non-CO2 greenhouse gases has been moved from individual scientists’ achievement to a common activity”.
Internally the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has monitored the progress of the project and gave scientific advice. During all General Assembly Meetings at least two members of the SAB were present and gave most valuable comments and advise during separate SAB / WP leader meetings.
The overall evolution was very positive and stated, that “InGOS is a well–organized project that made great progress with data harmonization, implementing standard procedures and testing new instruments” and that “InGOS is seen as solid and even world leading in the area of atmospheric measurements and particularly top–down emissions modeling. The process–orientated work provides solid descriptive information that broadens our understanding. The research that is done by InGOS bears directly on what many regards as the world´s most pressing environmental problem, anthropogenic climate change”.
With respect to the end of InGOS the SAB also spent attention on focus and possibilities of a follow–on program. “Due to the fact, that 40% of the radiative forcing impact of anthropogenic GHG emissions comes from non–CO2 GHGs, which play an immensely important role in the establishment and verification of policies to reduce anthropogenic climate change impacts, it would be foolish not to continue to support those aspects of InGOS that focus most directly on this problem”. Three priorities on studying non–CO2 GHGs have been mentioned:
- Continuing long–term measurements, because anthropogenic climate change cannot be studied without measurements that extend over time
- Continuing the modelling work, because one needs both observations and models to understand global and regional climate change
- Continuing support of process studies
Project Results:
Please see the attached pdf, which includes the main scientific and technological results / foregrounds.
Potential Impact:
InGOS as a project with almost 230 participating scientists and staff members from 14 countries has developed a unique network in its scientific field of climate research. InGOS combined atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic research and focussed on the main non–CO2 greenhouse gases CH4, N2O, SF6 and halocarbons, and H2. The impact of InGOS is exceptional and based on the international and interdisciplinary character, which enables and support scientists in collaborating within a diverse consortium and to work “out of the box” of their own research field. For the first time a project included all relevant aspects to investigate climate change such as harmonization and intensive quality contraol of as well historical as actual data, long–term monitoring of relevant gas species on a European level, intercomparison of measurement methods and development of new methods, provision of standardized good–practise guidelines, combination and verification of several modelling techniques with remote sensing and measurement data, quantification of sources by using isotopes, or assessment of non–CO2 GHG budgets at spatial scales by eddy covariance and flux–gradient techniques. The combination of these very different fields of science in one infrastructure project allowed establishing an overall picture of non–CO2 greenhouse gas emissions over Europe.
Synergy with policy makers
InGOS supported informed decisions in climate change and international emission reduction protocols for non-CO2 greenhouse gases and research strategies to respond to both the future political, societal and economic challenges and the development of scientific knowledge. InGOS made significant impact on many areas related to research and development, as well as the development of European environmental policies. InGOS delivered relevant scientific results and involved scientist functioned as authers and reviwers of international reports and assements. They were engaged with policy makers on local governmental, national and international level to advise them, e.g. on
- Stratospheric ozone–depletion and mitigation strategies to protect the ozone layer
- General greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation strategies
- Monitoring and emission verification of greenhouse gases
- Briefing of the DG Climate Action on verification of greenhouse gas inventories reported to UNFCCC
- Environmental regulation of greenhouse gases and mitigation options for agriculure
Several scientists of the InGOS network were not only involved in the 5th IPCC report (2014) but also in the new UNEP/WMO Ozone Assessment for Decision-Makers (2015) and finally contributed to the successful 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21).
It is likely that emission reduction in non-CO2 greenhouse gases will be more cost-effective than most CO2 emission reduction measures and will lead to quicker wins in actual decrease of global warming. The observation capabilities developed in InGOS allows to independently verify and also control the claimed emission reductions, and increasing the trust of the public and policy makers in the measures taken. By this InGOS clearly creates output such as expertise and scientific advice, which could be used by policy makers.
Building scientific knowledge and knowledge transfer
InGOS played an important role in integrating communities dealing with different observing platforms and those focused on one or more clusters of different greenhouse gases, and supporting their collaboration. Furthermore the network made a significant contribution in providing data for satellite data validation. Bringing these teams together in dedicated RTD projects has proven to be difficult, because of the cutting-edge scientific questions these RTD projects are addressing. In InGOS however the main focus was a solid infrastructure foundation as a common basis for all groups and research. Joint harmonization, quality control and improving data quality and accessibility for current and future research were the main tools to establish this. The unique combination in InGOS of marine, terrestrial ecosystem, satellite and tall tower scientists contributed to the advancement of science in a broad sense and enhanced further the leading position of Europe. In the course of the project the number of peer–reviewed publications and other dissemination activities increased significantly to more than 300 and will also last beyond the project. Due to on–going experimental work, data evaluation and writing activities several publications are expected in the near future. The total number of InGOS publications (light green field) sums up to 157 in January 2016.
The reached network and its scientific results are outstanding and the work of InGOS, particularly the interdisciplinary collabora–tions, has led to significant development in all disciplines and is not limited to InGOS. As an example, the access to measurement facilities was also appreciated by researchers outside the consortium and led to several new collaborations, and the developed guidelines of good practice or the recommendations for instrumentations have been taken up by other projects such as ICOS, e.g. for consideration of instrument choices or measurement methods. Knowledge transfer was also provided by offering workshops, summer schools and training at the measurement sites and labs in observation techniques and data processing, open also for participants outside the InGOS consortium. This snowball effect leads to an on–going scientific synergy, which could never be reached by individual projects.
InGOS created not only scientific synergy but also educational synergies and a close engagement with civil society. The most common synergy was the education and supervision students. The society was invited to participate in several public events, e.g the Royal Research Ship Discovery (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2015/06-discovery/ ), the Royal Holloway Science Festival (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/science/sciencefestival/home.aspx ), or several University researcher nights. Climate change was also a topic at LONCON3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (http://www.loncon3.org/documents/ReadMe_LR.pdf). Those activites ensure not only the education of future scientist but also attract the interest of the public for important subjects such as climate change and will led to a better knowledge and understanding, and an increased acceptance of needed measures.
Despite the more research orientated character of the project, InGOS has quite a few exploitable products. For the application of automated flux measurement chambers as an exploitable foreground the University of Amsterdam did engage with nature conservancy organizations Landschap Noordholland and Natuurmonumenten. For a mobile CH4 source mapping system, they engaged in 2014 with the municipality of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Firebrigade and a gas distribution company. Following on from InGOS support, the University of Edinburgh has received an additional one million euros from Research Councils UK to support the development of our Differential Absorption LiDAR. This has included funds to combine the InGOS CH4 laser system with a laser capable of detecting atmospheric CO2. We have also had support to ruggedise the system so it is field deployable. Scottish Enterprise (a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government) has recently awarded the university of Edinburgh with Phase 1 funds to become part of their ‘High-Growth Spin-Out Programme’ with a view to becoming a spin-out company with a turnover target of at least 7 million euros by 2018-19.
The improvements of the Spectronus instruments have found their way into a new version of the instruments and other findings have led to major improvements and new instrument versions at several of instruments (Picarro, LGR).
Data provision to a broad scientific community
As mentioned above, measurements and data collection within an international and interdisciplinary project aiming on collaboration and joint activities to increase knowledge are useless for the scientific community without availability and accessibility of the data. The archiving of the data, metadata and uncertainties in the atmospheric data center ensure the traceability and the documentation of several European historical and actual time series, and the INGOS datasets will be available to the whole scientific community also outside the InGOS consortium. The data collected in the context of InGOS are now part of a larger database and infrastructure that will ensure their availability also in the future. This guarantees a higher impact of the project results, in particular for the comparison campaigns. The development of specific components of the ecosystem database dedicated to the non-CO2 GHGs exchanges measurements forms an important basis for the ICOS ETC development where non-CO2 gas fluxes are also an important component.
Making the multi-species concentration and flux data available the InGOS data centers were facilitated through research on the NCGHG budgets, transport mechanisms and ecosystem/atmosphere interactions throughout Europe. The databases of integrated projects like CarboEurope-IP, CarboEocean and NitroEurope-IP are already being used by researchers all over the world, leading to many new insights in the Earth System. These data are used to make environmental assessments, validate model calculations or evaluate effectiveness of greenhouse emission reduction options, and providing these data was an important role of the InGOS data center. InGOS added both the halocarbons and new CH4, N2O, SF6, H2, and CO data to the already available data and became a ‘gateway’ to European measurements of the non-CO2 greenhouse gases.
Independent emission evaluation
International agreements on reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions require accurate accounting of GHG emissions and therefore rely on very accurate atmospheric measurements and are very sensitive to modelling errors. Both issues were addressed in InGOS.
InGOS offers unique harmonized and quality controlled datas sets which are of particular importance since they show global trends of greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions, and can reliably be merged for inverse model calculation of regional or continental-scale GHGs fluxes. The data produced within InGOS significantly increase the quality of monitoring activities and also of modeling approaches, which are used as official validation for GHGs emissions changes. The 222Rn data harmonization as well as the implementation of correction factors that can be applied to future measurements, e.g. in the framework of ICOS-RI, improve the reliability of regional transport models. InGOS enhances the capabilities of the inverse modeling work and demonstrate both the importance and the feasibility to verify bottom-up inventories of non-CO2 GHGs emissions by atmospheric observations and inverse modelling. This necessary for independent assessments of European emission and concentration levels as a valuable tool both for policy development and evaluation of implemented measures.
Understanding trends and linking satellites
InGOS supported key representative measurement stations and ensured comparability of results, both leading to a better understanding of flux and concentration trends at the continental level. InGOS further developed innovative ground-based measurements complementary to satellites. Remote sensing observations of atmospheric greenhouse gases from the ground as well as from space are available since about 10 years and their potential (retrieval as well as information content) is not fully exploited. Within InGOS ground-based data and satellite fields were integrated in advanced simulation models and led to new data products for non-CO2 greenhouse gases. The results have major impact on the development of the remote sensing measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases and their improvement.
Currently the first generation of satellite instruments dedicated to atmospheric greenhouse gas observations is in orbit and the data products developed in InGOS will help future satellite missions to provide atmospheric greenhouse gas data with higher precision and accuracy. The new data product allows separating the stratospheric and tropospheric CH4, which has been proven useful for model validation and also provides a direct link to the in situ measurements. This link is difficult to establish with the column averaged data product because of the uncertainties of stratospheric CH4, which is commonly not measured by the in situ measurements. It has been shown that remote sensing measurements are able to detect deficiencies in the models that are tailored to in situ data and a common use of in situ as well as remote sensing data should be used to constrain models. The results of InGOS cleary improved the quality of this methodological approach. Besides this a QA/QC procedure for the instrumental characterization using gas cells has been developed and implemented. This procedure has now been adopted by the global network, which demonstrates the impact of InGOS on the international community.
Within InGOS also the influence of scene specific parameters on the satellite retrievals has been investigated. The dataset produced during InGOS is widely used, especially for the validation of satellite retrievals, which have improved accordingly.
Enhancing the observational capacity of Europe
„Taking emission reduction measures without monitoring is like going on a diet without weighing yourself“ (Ray Weiss, SAB member InGOS).
Without long–term monitoring it is not possible to quantify and verify measures of climate change mitigation strategies. Mitigation of climate change is a key scientific and societal challenge. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) agreed to significantly limit global warming and reaching this target requires massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. However, several greenhouse gas emissions, e.g. CH4 are not well quantified and there are significant discrepancies between official inventories of emissions and estimates derived from direct atmospheric measurement. Therefore, new advanced combinations of measurement and modelling are highly needed as well as a long–term observation of greenhouse gas emissions and fluxes. Both are indispensable to ensure quantification and verification of emission reduction and mitigation efforts. InGOS contributed to the latter by the expansion of the observation capacity of NCGHGs in Europe on several levels: I) through access to a dense network of more than 20 European measurement facilities, II) calibration and measurement services, III) including isotopic analysis, eddy covariance measurements and footprint models to verify greenhouse gas sources and sinks, or VI) knowledge transfer by training activities also for external participants. The provision of working standards and participation in intercomparison experiments together with the data harmonization activities allowed the build–up of a dense operational European measurement network, significantly improved the provision of international comparable data and ensured that new monitoring stations were linked to the required QA/QC level of InGOS.
Last but not least InGOS contributed also to keep several European measurement stations such as the TCCON sites operational. The European part of TCCON relies financially on short–term projects, which makes needed long–term oberservations difficult. Currently the European part of TCCON has funding problems. Neither the Copernicus programme, nor ESA nor the national space agencies are currently supporting the operation of the European TCCON sites. Hence some of the sites could only be operated partly due to support received through InGOS, by freeing resources for actual operations.
Verification of sources and detection of new climate relevant gases
Effective emission reduction can only be achieved if sources are properly quantified, and tools exist to independently verify mitigation efforts. The analytical developments to measure isotopic compositions achieved in INGOS allow a better quantification of the relative contributions of different source categories to the atmospheric greenhouse gas budgets, and contribute to verification of mitigation efforts that are required to reach the global warming targets. The development of instruments that are capable of measuring the isotopic composition of e.g. methane in the field is a key step forward towards a better quantification of the European and global CH4 budget and are expected to find wide use in the future. E.g. the measured CH4 emissions at the Cabauw tall tower are dominated by agricultural sources, but variations in the source signatures allow identification of events with increased contributions from fossil fuel and landfill sources. The implementation of isotope data in models show that modeled source signatures could cause an over– or underestimation of different sources, whereas the differences in the source signatures appear to originate from differences in the inventories and not from differences in the models. By those result InGOS helps to improve the validation of variations in the source mix and therefor the control of mitigation measures.
Besides the verification of sources also new climate relevant gases were found, which has social impacts in several aspects. The detection of previously unidentified CFCs and HCFCs by Laube et al. (2014) marked a turning point in the analysis of these ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere. Until then only CFCs and HCFCs were detected which had been released either during the production or usage of consumer goods, such as foams and refrigerators. However, with the detection of CFC-112, 112a, 113a, and HCFC-133a this paradigm has changed. These gases were never produced in large quantities for consumer products and hence the conclusion was made that they were unintentional by-products of the production of HFCs. Disturbingly, emissions of some of these gases were found to have been increasing in recent years, which might be caused by less careful production processes. Second, a new class of compounds (HFOs, hydrofluorolefines) was detected within InGOS by Vollmer et al. (2015c) for the first time in the atmosphere at Jungfraujoch. HFOs have a very small atmospheric lifetime and are therefore foreseen as the major replacement compounds for the long-lived HFCs, with their large impact on climate. Measurements of HFOs, which started in 2011, showed no detectable background concentrations for these compounds. However, within the course of the InGOS project the picture changed completely. From being detected only during sporadic pollution events, two of these compounds (HFO-1234yf and HFO-1234ze(E)) can now regularly be measured above the background and concentrations are rising constantly. This example shows in a striking way the ability of the measurements of halocarbons within InGOS to detect new gases and to act as an early-warning tool both on the European and the global scale.
List of Websites:
The website of the project was maintained by the project coordinator and served as a central platform within and outside the consortium. It ensured the dissemination of project relevant information, results, and access to TNA´s.
For sensible information the website contained a to the consortium restricted area, including general project documents (e.g. Grand Agreement, Consortium Agreement), deliverables, reports, presentations, and minutes of meetings. The website can be found at: http://www.ingos-infrastructure.eu/.
InGOS was an international EU Infrastructure project with more than 200 participating scientists and staff members from 14 European countries. InGOS, the acronym for “Integrated non CO2 Greenhouse gas Observing System”, has developed a unique network in its scientific field of climate research. InGOS combined atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic research and focussed on the main non–CO2 greenhouse gases CH4, N2O, SF6 and halocarbons, and H2. The impact of InGOS is exceptional and based on the international and interdisciplinary character, which enables and support scientists in collaborating within a diverse consortium and to work “outside the box” of their own research field. For the first time a project included all relevant aspects to investigate climate change such as harmonization and intensive quality contraol of as well historical as actual data, long–term monitoring of relevant gas species on a European level, intercomparison of state–of–the–art measurement methods and development of new methods, provision of standards and standardized good–practise guidelines, combination and verification of several modelling techniques with remote sensing and measurement data, quantification of sources by using isotopes, or assessment of non–CO2 GHG budgets at spatial scales by eddy covariance and flux–gradient techniques. The combination of these very different fields of natural sciences in one infrastructure project allowed establishing an overall picture of non–CO2 greenhouse gas emissions over Europe. InGOS successfully reach its initial objectives, in particular InGOS has:
- Harmonized and standardized historical and actual European NCGHGs measurements by quality check and developing common QC/QA procedures
- Improved NCGHG flux measurements and linked European flux towers to the atmospheric observational network
- Improved measurement methods by testing&developing new innovative techniques and strategies
- Tested advanced isotope techniques for application in the network and enabled attribution of the atmospheric fractions to source categories
- Integrated marine observations of the NCGHGs with land-based observations
- Supported further development of the European NCGHG network and integrated data for network evaluation by using sophisticated, high–resolution inverse modeling, data-assimilation methods and developments in bottom up inventories
- Linked the network to remote sensing data from in-situ and satellite observations
- Generated a public European non-CO2 GHG observation database
- Provided near-real time data of atmospheric CH4, N2O, SF6, and H2, and prepared data integration with the ICOS Research Infrastructure (Integrated Carbon Observation System), established as an ERIC in November 2015, to ensure operational, long–term monitoring perspectives
- Supported existing observation sites, transfer selected sites into supersites and provided access to key field stations and installations
- Expanded the current network with new stations in under sampled regions
- Stimulated atmospheric science knowledge transfer between experts and young scientists
With more than 300 dissimination activities, from wich up to now more than 150 peer–reviewed publications, InGOS creates significant output such as expertise and scientific advice, which could be used by policy makers.
InGOS made and make significant impact on many areas related to research and development, as well as the development of European environmental policies. InGOS supports informed decisions in climate change and international emission reduction protocols for non-CO2 greenhouse gases and research strategies, to respond to both the future political, societal and economic challenges and the development of scientific knowledge. Several scientists of the InGOS network were not only involved in the 5th IPCC report (2014) but also in the new UNEP/WMO Ozone Assessment for Decision-Makers (2015) and finally contributed to the successful 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21). The observation capabilities developed in InGOS allows independently verifying and also controlling the claimed emission reductions, and increasing the trust of the public and policy makers in the measures taken. Based on the excellent collaboration, the outcome and the need of such networks to scientifically support international climate relevant agreements (e.g.the Kyoto and the Montreal protocol or the new Paris agreement (COP-21)), the InGOS consortium expressed a clear commitment for a follow–up of the project.
Project Context and Objectives:
Project context: InGOS has been setup as an international infrastructure project to strengthen the European observation system of non–CO2 greenhouse gases. The human induced increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) since the industrial revolution is causing significant changes in Earth’s radiation balance. At present, the non-CO2 GHGs (NCGHG) contribute about 37% (0.97 Wm-2) of the global anthropogenic radiative forcing of all long-lived GHGs while 63% (1.66 Wm-2) is attributed to CO2. The increasing global atmospheric mixing ratios of CO2 and the most important NCGHGs (methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and halocarbons (with more than 40 different species) have been fairly well monitored by direct atmospheric observations. Systematic measurements of NCGHGs started in the 1980s, whereas CO2 measurements were already initiated in the 1950s at the South Pole and at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
Global monitoring of GHGs is performed by various research laboratories and national agencies (such as NOAA/ESRL). An important part of this network is coordinated within the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) program, and data are reported to the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases by GAW participants. Currently, a significant limitation of this database is, however, that different networks or institutes report their measurements on different calibration scales. The lack of a common calibration is very severe in particular for N2O, for which the standard measurement technique by gas chromatography exhibits a strong non-linearity, and comparison of measurements from different groups show significant offsets.
The emissions of NCGHG´s are very uncertain and it is unknown how future climate changes will feedback into the land use coupled emissions of CH4 and N2O. Nevertheless, the NCGHG atmospheric abundances will increase further in the future and the emissions of these gases are an attractive target for climate change mitigation policies. The monitoring of atmospheric GHGs with high accuracy and precision is essential to provide 'top-down' emission estimates, using inverse atmospheric transport models tracing back measured atmospheric mixing ratios to the regions where these GHGs were emitted.
Project objectives: InGOS aimed to support and integrate the observing capacity of Europe for NCGHG such as CH4, N2O, SF6, halocarbons, and also hydrogen (H2). InGOS aimed to improve the existing European observation system, which provide insight into the concentration levels and European and extra-European emissions of the NCGHGs. This allowed to detect the spatial and temporal distribution (hotspots) of the sources and changes in emissions due to mitigation and feedbacks with climate change. The data from the network enable to better constrain the emissions of NCGHGs within the EU and show whether emission reduction policies are effective. Thus, to strengthen the European observation system, the project had several objectives:
- Harmonization and standardization of historical and actual NCGHGs measurements in Europe by quality check and developing common QC/QA procedures
- Improvement of NCGHG flux measurements and linkage of European flux towers to the atmospheric observational network
- Improvement of measurement methods by testing and developing new innovative techniques and strategies
- Test advanced isotope techniques for application in the network to enable attribution of the atmospheric fractions to source categories
- Integrate and further integrate marine observations of the NCGHGs with land-based observations
- Support further development of the European NCGHG network and integrate data for network evaluation by using sophisticated, high–resolution inverse modeling, data-assimilation methods and developments in bottom up inventories
- Link the network to remote sensing data of column abundances from in-situ and satellite observations
- Generate a European non-CO2 GHG observation database, which will be made available to the scientific community and general public
- Provide near-real time access to the atmospheric CH4, N2O, SF6, and H2 data, and prepare data integration with the ICOS Research Infrastructure (Integrated Carbon Observation System) to ensure operational, long–term monitoring perspectives
- Support existing observation sites, transfer selected sites into supersites and provide access to key field stations and installations
- Provide capacity building in new member states and countries with inadequate existing infrastructure and expand the current network with new stations in under sampled regions
- Stimulate atmospheric science knowledge transfer between experts, and between experts and young scientists
The overall strategy to achieve the objectives of improved data quality, coverage and availability was based on strengthening (using network activities), outreach/cooperation (using trans-national access and service activities) and innovation (using joint research activities). These activities were divided into 18 work packages, which are executed by 37 partners all over Europe. The relatively large number of participants was needed to have proper coverage of the European domain and to enable harmonization across different scientific fields of marine, terrestrial and remote sensing research. TNAs were designed to open up almost all available sites in Europe for visiting researchers, from boreal Finland down to Mediterranean Spain or Cyprus.
The Networking Activities enhanced the quality of the services provided by the participating infrastructures within the InGOS network. The strategy to attain such progress comprised co-operation between the participants through expert workshops, improved Near-Real-Time (NRT) data availability for quality check of instrument functionality, ongoing comparison programs and campaigns, working out of good practice recommendations, and harmonization of the concentration measurements by enhancing the availability of reference gases calibrated on the respective WMO and AGAGE scales.
The TransNational Access Activities enabled users to conduct high-quality research by offering access to different infrastructures such as measurement towers, airborne flux platform, calibration service, and isotope analysis service. Parts of the TNAs were used for campaigns that were related to the NAs and JRAs and facilitated scientists both in and outside InGOS to join these activities.
The InGOS data center was a Service Activity that provided access to non-CO2 gas observations in Europe. This included near real time data to a wide audience as well as QA/QC controlled data for the international scientific community. The center was collocated with the CO2 data center foreseen in preparation for ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System), providing a solid base for the future ICOS data center.
The Joint Research Activities contributed to improvements of the InGOS infrastructure. This included evaluation of the potential benefits of new available state-of-the-art instruments, methods or techniques, e.g. novel in-situ FTIR, CRDS and remote sensing (DIAL) techniques, remotely sensed CH4, integration of NCGHG measurements on different spatial scales, new isotopologue instruments for CH4, instrumentation for halocarbon measurements, or tower measurements to specify the effects of regional fluxes versus effects from sources further upstream.
The objectives and their progress were subject of internal and external reviews to ensure a high quality level. In December 2013 the responsible EU Project Officer (PO) Anna–Maria Johansson and Prof. Wilfried Winiwarter as an external reviewer evaluated InGOS. In the executive summary it has been stated that “The InGOS project has demonstrated excellent progress in its first period” and that “Measuring non-CO2 greenhouse gases has been moved from individual scientists’ achievement to a common activity”.
Internally the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has monitored the progress of the project and gave scientific advice. During all General Assembly Meetings at least two members of the SAB were present and gave most valuable comments and advise during separate SAB / WP leader meetings.
The overall evolution was very positive and stated, that “InGOS is a well–organized project that made great progress with data harmonization, implementing standard procedures and testing new instruments” and that “InGOS is seen as solid and even world leading in the area of atmospheric measurements and particularly top–down emissions modeling. The process–orientated work provides solid descriptive information that broadens our understanding. The research that is done by InGOS bears directly on what many regards as the world´s most pressing environmental problem, anthropogenic climate change”.
With respect to the end of InGOS the SAB also spent attention on focus and possibilities of a follow–on program. “Due to the fact, that 40% of the radiative forcing impact of anthropogenic GHG emissions comes from non–CO2 GHGs, which play an immensely important role in the establishment and verification of policies to reduce anthropogenic climate change impacts, it would be foolish not to continue to support those aspects of InGOS that focus most directly on this problem”. Three priorities on studying non–CO2 GHGs have been mentioned:
- Continuing long–term measurements, because anthropogenic climate change cannot be studied without measurements that extend over time
- Continuing the modelling work, because one needs both observations and models to understand global and regional climate change
- Continuing support of process studies
Project Results:
Please see the attached pdf, which includes the main scientific and technological results / foregrounds.
Potential Impact:
InGOS as a project with almost 230 participating scientists and staff members from 14 countries has developed a unique network in its scientific field of climate research. InGOS combined atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic research and focussed on the main non–CO2 greenhouse gases CH4, N2O, SF6 and halocarbons, and H2. The impact of InGOS is exceptional and based on the international and interdisciplinary character, which enables and support scientists in collaborating within a diverse consortium and to work “out of the box” of their own research field. For the first time a project included all relevant aspects to investigate climate change such as harmonization and intensive quality contraol of as well historical as actual data, long–term monitoring of relevant gas species on a European level, intercomparison of measurement methods and development of new methods, provision of standardized good–practise guidelines, combination and verification of several modelling techniques with remote sensing and measurement data, quantification of sources by using isotopes, or assessment of non–CO2 GHG budgets at spatial scales by eddy covariance and flux–gradient techniques. The combination of these very different fields of science in one infrastructure project allowed establishing an overall picture of non–CO2 greenhouse gas emissions over Europe.
Synergy with policy makers
InGOS supported informed decisions in climate change and international emission reduction protocols for non-CO2 greenhouse gases and research strategies to respond to both the future political, societal and economic challenges and the development of scientific knowledge. InGOS made significant impact on many areas related to research and development, as well as the development of European environmental policies. InGOS delivered relevant scientific results and involved scientist functioned as authers and reviwers of international reports and assements. They were engaged with policy makers on local governmental, national and international level to advise them, e.g. on
- Stratospheric ozone–depletion and mitigation strategies to protect the ozone layer
- General greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation strategies
- Monitoring and emission verification of greenhouse gases
- Briefing of the DG Climate Action on verification of greenhouse gas inventories reported to UNFCCC
- Environmental regulation of greenhouse gases and mitigation options for agriculure
Several scientists of the InGOS network were not only involved in the 5th IPCC report (2014) but also in the new UNEP/WMO Ozone Assessment for Decision-Makers (2015) and finally contributed to the successful 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21).
It is likely that emission reduction in non-CO2 greenhouse gases will be more cost-effective than most CO2 emission reduction measures and will lead to quicker wins in actual decrease of global warming. The observation capabilities developed in InGOS allows to independently verify and also control the claimed emission reductions, and increasing the trust of the public and policy makers in the measures taken. By this InGOS clearly creates output such as expertise and scientific advice, which could be used by policy makers.
Building scientific knowledge and knowledge transfer
InGOS played an important role in integrating communities dealing with different observing platforms and those focused on one or more clusters of different greenhouse gases, and supporting their collaboration. Furthermore the network made a significant contribution in providing data for satellite data validation. Bringing these teams together in dedicated RTD projects has proven to be difficult, because of the cutting-edge scientific questions these RTD projects are addressing. In InGOS however the main focus was a solid infrastructure foundation as a common basis for all groups and research. Joint harmonization, quality control and improving data quality and accessibility for current and future research were the main tools to establish this. The unique combination in InGOS of marine, terrestrial ecosystem, satellite and tall tower scientists contributed to the advancement of science in a broad sense and enhanced further the leading position of Europe. In the course of the project the number of peer–reviewed publications and other dissemination activities increased significantly to more than 300 and will also last beyond the project. Due to on–going experimental work, data evaluation and writing activities several publications are expected in the near future. The total number of InGOS publications (light green field) sums up to 157 in January 2016.
The reached network and its scientific results are outstanding and the work of InGOS, particularly the interdisciplinary collabora–tions, has led to significant development in all disciplines and is not limited to InGOS. As an example, the access to measurement facilities was also appreciated by researchers outside the consortium and led to several new collaborations, and the developed guidelines of good practice or the recommendations for instrumentations have been taken up by other projects such as ICOS, e.g. for consideration of instrument choices or measurement methods. Knowledge transfer was also provided by offering workshops, summer schools and training at the measurement sites and labs in observation techniques and data processing, open also for participants outside the InGOS consortium. This snowball effect leads to an on–going scientific synergy, which could never be reached by individual projects.
InGOS created not only scientific synergy but also educational synergies and a close engagement with civil society. The most common synergy was the education and supervision students. The society was invited to participate in several public events, e.g the Royal Research Ship Discovery (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2015/06-discovery/ ), the Royal Holloway Science Festival (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/science/sciencefestival/home.aspx ), or several University researcher nights. Climate change was also a topic at LONCON3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (http://www.loncon3.org/documents/ReadMe_LR.pdf). Those activites ensure not only the education of future scientist but also attract the interest of the public for important subjects such as climate change and will led to a better knowledge and understanding, and an increased acceptance of needed measures.
Despite the more research orientated character of the project, InGOS has quite a few exploitable products. For the application of automated flux measurement chambers as an exploitable foreground the University of Amsterdam did engage with nature conservancy organizations Landschap Noordholland and Natuurmonumenten. For a mobile CH4 source mapping system, they engaged in 2014 with the municipality of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Firebrigade and a gas distribution company. Following on from InGOS support, the University of Edinburgh has received an additional one million euros from Research Councils UK to support the development of our Differential Absorption LiDAR. This has included funds to combine the InGOS CH4 laser system with a laser capable of detecting atmospheric CO2. We have also had support to ruggedise the system so it is field deployable. Scottish Enterprise (a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government) has recently awarded the university of Edinburgh with Phase 1 funds to become part of their ‘High-Growth Spin-Out Programme’ with a view to becoming a spin-out company with a turnover target of at least 7 million euros by 2018-19.
The improvements of the Spectronus instruments have found their way into a new version of the instruments and other findings have led to major improvements and new instrument versions at several of instruments (Picarro, LGR).
Data provision to a broad scientific community
As mentioned above, measurements and data collection within an international and interdisciplinary project aiming on collaboration and joint activities to increase knowledge are useless for the scientific community without availability and accessibility of the data. The archiving of the data, metadata and uncertainties in the atmospheric data center ensure the traceability and the documentation of several European historical and actual time series, and the INGOS datasets will be available to the whole scientific community also outside the InGOS consortium. The data collected in the context of InGOS are now part of a larger database and infrastructure that will ensure their availability also in the future. This guarantees a higher impact of the project results, in particular for the comparison campaigns. The development of specific components of the ecosystem database dedicated to the non-CO2 GHGs exchanges measurements forms an important basis for the ICOS ETC development where non-CO2 gas fluxes are also an important component.
Making the multi-species concentration and flux data available the InGOS data centers were facilitated through research on the NCGHG budgets, transport mechanisms and ecosystem/atmosphere interactions throughout Europe. The databases of integrated projects like CarboEurope-IP, CarboEocean and NitroEurope-IP are already being used by researchers all over the world, leading to many new insights in the Earth System. These data are used to make environmental assessments, validate model calculations or evaluate effectiveness of greenhouse emission reduction options, and providing these data was an important role of the InGOS data center. InGOS added both the halocarbons and new CH4, N2O, SF6, H2, and CO data to the already available data and became a ‘gateway’ to European measurements of the non-CO2 greenhouse gases.
Independent emission evaluation
International agreements on reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions require accurate accounting of GHG emissions and therefore rely on very accurate atmospheric measurements and are very sensitive to modelling errors. Both issues were addressed in InGOS.
InGOS offers unique harmonized and quality controlled datas sets which are of particular importance since they show global trends of greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions, and can reliably be merged for inverse model calculation of regional or continental-scale GHGs fluxes. The data produced within InGOS significantly increase the quality of monitoring activities and also of modeling approaches, which are used as official validation for GHGs emissions changes. The 222Rn data harmonization as well as the implementation of correction factors that can be applied to future measurements, e.g. in the framework of ICOS-RI, improve the reliability of regional transport models. InGOS enhances the capabilities of the inverse modeling work and demonstrate both the importance and the feasibility to verify bottom-up inventories of non-CO2 GHGs emissions by atmospheric observations and inverse modelling. This necessary for independent assessments of European emission and concentration levels as a valuable tool both for policy development and evaluation of implemented measures.
Understanding trends and linking satellites
InGOS supported key representative measurement stations and ensured comparability of results, both leading to a better understanding of flux and concentration trends at the continental level. InGOS further developed innovative ground-based measurements complementary to satellites. Remote sensing observations of atmospheric greenhouse gases from the ground as well as from space are available since about 10 years and their potential (retrieval as well as information content) is not fully exploited. Within InGOS ground-based data and satellite fields were integrated in advanced simulation models and led to new data products for non-CO2 greenhouse gases. The results have major impact on the development of the remote sensing measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases and their improvement.
Currently the first generation of satellite instruments dedicated to atmospheric greenhouse gas observations is in orbit and the data products developed in InGOS will help future satellite missions to provide atmospheric greenhouse gas data with higher precision and accuracy. The new data product allows separating the stratospheric and tropospheric CH4, which has been proven useful for model validation and also provides a direct link to the in situ measurements. This link is difficult to establish with the column averaged data product because of the uncertainties of stratospheric CH4, which is commonly not measured by the in situ measurements. It has been shown that remote sensing measurements are able to detect deficiencies in the models that are tailored to in situ data and a common use of in situ as well as remote sensing data should be used to constrain models. The results of InGOS cleary improved the quality of this methodological approach. Besides this a QA/QC procedure for the instrumental characterization using gas cells has been developed and implemented. This procedure has now been adopted by the global network, which demonstrates the impact of InGOS on the international community.
Within InGOS also the influence of scene specific parameters on the satellite retrievals has been investigated. The dataset produced during InGOS is widely used, especially for the validation of satellite retrievals, which have improved accordingly.
Enhancing the observational capacity of Europe
„Taking emission reduction measures without monitoring is like going on a diet without weighing yourself“ (Ray Weiss, SAB member InGOS).
Without long–term monitoring it is not possible to quantify and verify measures of climate change mitigation strategies. Mitigation of climate change is a key scientific and societal challenge. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) agreed to significantly limit global warming and reaching this target requires massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. However, several greenhouse gas emissions, e.g. CH4 are not well quantified and there are significant discrepancies between official inventories of emissions and estimates derived from direct atmospheric measurement. Therefore, new advanced combinations of measurement and modelling are highly needed as well as a long–term observation of greenhouse gas emissions and fluxes. Both are indispensable to ensure quantification and verification of emission reduction and mitigation efforts. InGOS contributed to the latter by the expansion of the observation capacity of NCGHGs in Europe on several levels: I) through access to a dense network of more than 20 European measurement facilities, II) calibration and measurement services, III) including isotopic analysis, eddy covariance measurements and footprint models to verify greenhouse gas sources and sinks, or VI) knowledge transfer by training activities also for external participants. The provision of working standards and participation in intercomparison experiments together with the data harmonization activities allowed the build–up of a dense operational European measurement network, significantly improved the provision of international comparable data and ensured that new monitoring stations were linked to the required QA/QC level of InGOS.
Last but not least InGOS contributed also to keep several European measurement stations such as the TCCON sites operational. The European part of TCCON relies financially on short–term projects, which makes needed long–term oberservations difficult. Currently the European part of TCCON has funding problems. Neither the Copernicus programme, nor ESA nor the national space agencies are currently supporting the operation of the European TCCON sites. Hence some of the sites could only be operated partly due to support received through InGOS, by freeing resources for actual operations.
Verification of sources and detection of new climate relevant gases
Effective emission reduction can only be achieved if sources are properly quantified, and tools exist to independently verify mitigation efforts. The analytical developments to measure isotopic compositions achieved in INGOS allow a better quantification of the relative contributions of different source categories to the atmospheric greenhouse gas budgets, and contribute to verification of mitigation efforts that are required to reach the global warming targets. The development of instruments that are capable of measuring the isotopic composition of e.g. methane in the field is a key step forward towards a better quantification of the European and global CH4 budget and are expected to find wide use in the future. E.g. the measured CH4 emissions at the Cabauw tall tower are dominated by agricultural sources, but variations in the source signatures allow identification of events with increased contributions from fossil fuel and landfill sources. The implementation of isotope data in models show that modeled source signatures could cause an over– or underestimation of different sources, whereas the differences in the source signatures appear to originate from differences in the inventories and not from differences in the models. By those result InGOS helps to improve the validation of variations in the source mix and therefor the control of mitigation measures.
Besides the verification of sources also new climate relevant gases were found, which has social impacts in several aspects. The detection of previously unidentified CFCs and HCFCs by Laube et al. (2014) marked a turning point in the analysis of these ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere. Until then only CFCs and HCFCs were detected which had been released either during the production or usage of consumer goods, such as foams and refrigerators. However, with the detection of CFC-112, 112a, 113a, and HCFC-133a this paradigm has changed. These gases were never produced in large quantities for consumer products and hence the conclusion was made that they were unintentional by-products of the production of HFCs. Disturbingly, emissions of some of these gases were found to have been increasing in recent years, which might be caused by less careful production processes. Second, a new class of compounds (HFOs, hydrofluorolefines) was detected within InGOS by Vollmer et al. (2015c) for the first time in the atmosphere at Jungfraujoch. HFOs have a very small atmospheric lifetime and are therefore foreseen as the major replacement compounds for the long-lived HFCs, with their large impact on climate. Measurements of HFOs, which started in 2011, showed no detectable background concentrations for these compounds. However, within the course of the InGOS project the picture changed completely. From being detected only during sporadic pollution events, two of these compounds (HFO-1234yf and HFO-1234ze(E)) can now regularly be measured above the background and concentrations are rising constantly. This example shows in a striking way the ability of the measurements of halocarbons within InGOS to detect new gases and to act as an early-warning tool both on the European and the global scale.
List of Websites:
The website of the project was maintained by the project coordinator and served as a central platform within and outside the consortium. It ensured the dissemination of project relevant information, results, and access to TNA´s.
For sensible information the website contained a to the consortium restricted area, including general project documents (e.g. Grand Agreement, Consortium Agreement), deliverables, reports, presentations, and minutes of meetings. The website can be found at: http://www.ingos-infrastructure.eu/.
