A new phase of funding has been secured until July 2014 for the pre-operational atmospheric monitoring and forecasting service of the European programme Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).
The new grant agreement funded under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme will enable the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate (MACC) project, co-ordinated by ECMWF, to be continued under the name MACC Interim Implementation (MACC-II). The agreement entered into force on 14 October and the project will effectively start on 1 November 2011.
MACC-II will largely continue the production streams of MACC and build on the research and development work completed for that project, but will no longer include support for the supply of national air-quality observations or the study of downstream test cases. There will be increased focus on the co-ordination of validation activities, the estimation of emissions, external communications and user support services. The MACC-II consortium, led by ECMWF, comprises 36 partners from 13 European countries.
Services will continue to be provided on the MACC website. It is expected that MACC-II will lead to the operational phase of the GMES Atmospheric Monitoring Service in 2014.
Simulation of surface carbon monoxide with the Integrated Forecasting System extended with an in-line representation of chemical processes (C-IFS). With an atmospheric lifetime of approximately one month, carbon monoxide is in particular a tracer of combustion sources, such as biomass burning and various anthropogenic activities