ICOS is a distributed observation network to monitor the European carbon and net greenhouse gas balance. It consists of a large number of high precision observatories for greenhouse gas concentrations and exchange fluxes all over Europe and central facilities that process and integrate all data. Following the progress of emission reductions and changes in the (semi)natural fluxes of greenhouse gases is essential to improve Earth System science and to evaluate and develop climate change abatement policies.
ICOS Netherlands is part of the Ruisdael Observatory that is supported as one of the ESFRI Netherlands national roadmap facilities by NWO since 2018. The Ruisdael Observatory will be operational in rural and urban areas
to investigate the interaction between the heterogeneous mosaic landscape and the atmosphere. Observations and
models will be merged in real time, integrating a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, to form a virtual laboratory for understanding multi-scale processes in atmospheric chemistry and physics, and by doing so improve the accuracy of climate, weather and air quality models on the regional scale. These key advances will lead to new knowledge of how the atmospheric processes at these scales are influenced by:
- - Land-atmosphere interactions,
- - Aerosol-cloud-turbulence interactions,
- - The large-scale circulation,
which will allow to develop an explicit representation of atmospheric processes on the regional scale for weather, climate and air quality and as consequence advance our understanding of some of the most pressing questions in
atmospheric science:
- attribution of the spatial and temporal variabilities of greenhouse and other trace gases to sources and sinks
- enhanced understanding, detection, and prediction of climate and weather extremes.
