During May 2020 ACTRIS organized a campaign for studying the changes in the atmosphere during the COVID-19 lockdown. The question was how possible will be to quantify the impact of the decreased emissions on the state of the atmosphere outside the urban areas, on a time-span of several weeks. EARLINET, an active ACTRIS contributor, is running its lidars and intensifies its regular measurements in order to provide a scientifically relevant answer.
The scope of the campaign was to monitor the atmosphere’s structure during lockdown and early relaxation period in Europe and to identify possible changes due to decreased emissions, by comparison to the aerosol climatology in Europe. NOA-ReACT Team participated in the experiment with continuous observations of aerosols and clouds from the PANGEA station. More results from this experiment in: https://www.earlinet.org/index.php?id=covid-19