The S5PVAL-JINJA campaign is planned to begin in the summer of 2022, and will last for a duration of one year. This campaign is part of the ESA SVANTE-QA4EO project and lead by the University of Leicester, in collaboration with the National Fisheries Resources Research Institute (NaFIRRI), the Technical University of Munich, the University of Edinburgh, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
For the duration of the campaign, a Bruker EM27/SUN spectrometer (part of the Collaborative Carbon Column Observing Network, COCCON – Frey et al 2019) will be operated on the roof of the NaFIRRI headquarters in Jinja, Uganda (0.417° N, 33.207° E, 1157 m.a.s.l). The site is located on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, close to the source of the Nile, where it experiences a tropical climate with two main wet seasons (March to May, and October to December) brought about by the movement of the inter-tropical convergence zone.
An automated weatherproof enclosure for the instrument, kindly lent by TU Munich (Dietrich et al 2021), allows us to take continuous, remote observations of the column-averaged concentrations of methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. These will be the only measurements of this kind in tropical East Africa (following on from an initial three months of observations made in 2020 at the same site, Humpage et al 2022), making them a very useful resource to contribute towards validation of the Sentinel 5P methane and carbon monoxide data products. The site is also of great interest for scientific reasons, given the prevalence of wetlands in Uganda and South Sudan to the north of the site which have been shown to be a significant natural source of methane during the wet seasons (Lunt et al 2021), in addition to more local emissions sources such as biomass burning events.
Photo from January 2020 of the University of Leicester EM27/SUN operating on the roof at the National Fisheries Resources Research Institute in Jinja, Uganda. TU Munich has kindly lent the enclosure to us for this work.
For more information, please contact Neil Humpage and Hartmut Boesch.
References:
Frey, M., Sha, M. K., Hase, F., Kiel, M., Blumenstock, T., Harig, R., Surawicz, G., Deutscher, N. M., Shiomi, K., Franklin, J. E., Boesch, H., Chen, J., Grutter, M., Ohyama, H., Sun, Y., Butz, A., Mengistu Tsidu, G., Ene, D., Wunch, D., Cao, Z., Garcia, O., Ramonet, M., Vogel, F., and Orphal, J.: Building the COllaborative Carbon Column Observing Network (COCCON): long-term stability and ensemble performance of the EM27/SUN Fourier transform spectrometer, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 12, 1513–1530, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-1513-2019, 2019.
Dietrich, F., Chen, J., Voggenreiter, B., Aigner, P., Nachtigall, N., and Reger, B.: MUCCnet: Munich Urban Carbon Column network, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 14, 1111–1126, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-1111-2021, 2021.
Humpage, N., Boesch, H., Okello, W., Dietrich, F., Chen, J., Lunt, M.F., Feng, L., Palmer, P.I., Parker, R.J., and Hase, F.: Greenhouse gas column observations from a portable spectrometer in Uganda, in preparation, 2022.
Lunt, M.F., Palmer, P.I., Lorente, A., Borsdorff, T., Landgraf, J., Parker, R.J., and Boesch, H., Rain-fed pulses of methane from East Africa during 2018-2019 contributed to atmospheric growth rate, Environ. Res. Lett. 16 024021, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abd8fa, 2021.
