Download ALANIS Statement of Work here.

The Eurasian boreal region is the largest terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, and understanding its role in the global Earth system is essential. Boreal forests play a vital part in mitigating global warming by storing billions of tons of carbon formed since the last glacial maximum around 20 000 years ago. Northern lakes and wetlands, on the other hand, are important sources of methane and other trace gases. Finally, boreal forests produce natural secondary organic aerosols that can scatter sunlight back to space and act as a basis for cloud droplet formation.

In the last few years, Earth Observation (EO) satellites have shown the potential to become a major tool for observing the main processes in the land-atmosphere interface over the extremely wide and often unreachable northern areas of boreal Eurasia. In this context, the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with iLEAPS has launched the Atmosphere-LANd Integrated Study (ALANIS).

ALANIS structure

The study encloses three different projects, each addressing a specific thematic area. In particular, the three ALANIS thematic projects address the following issues:

ALANIS-Methane: Reducing current uncertainties in methane emissions by using EO-based products characterising boreal lake and wetland dynamics and atmospheric methane concentrations in coupled land-atmosphere models;

ALANIS-Smoke Plumes: Improving the estimation of plume injection height of biomass burning events in boreal Eurasia and reducing current uncertainties in related greenhouse-gas and aerosol dispersion forecast;

ALANIS-Aerosols: Discriminating natural aerosols emitted by boreal Eurasian forests from long-range transported fine anthropogenic aerosols.

The project is funded by the ESA’s Support to Science Element (STSE).

ALANIS themes websites:
•      ALANIS-Methane (http://www.alanis-methane.info)
•      ALANIS-Aerosols (http://www.alanis-aerosols.info)
•      ALANIS-Smoke Plumes (http://www.alanis-smokeplumes.info)