OVERVIEW

a. Mission

The mission of APCG (http://apcg.meteo.noa.gr/) is to promote world-class atmospheric research by shedding light on problems of compelling scientific interest and increasing social relevance.

b. Research Focus

Within the Institute’s research area of “Atmospheric Environment”, the group’s activities are targeted towards understanding physical and chemical processes in the atmosphere, seizing the opportunity provided by the complex and vulnerable Mediterranean environment and upscaling its activities, deriving from this experience, at the international level.

c. Main Scientific Directions

Atmospheric composition – focusing on the study of levels and variation of different types of aerosol and trace gases, in both urban and pristine environments. This research, empowered by observations, data assimilation and modeling, improves society’s ability to predict how future changes in atmospheric composition will affect climate, weather and air quality.

Air quality research – geared towards the monitoring of gaseous and particulate pollutants, as well as the detection and measurement of chemical compounds that are harmful to the environment and public health. The focus is on developing and maintaining long time series of pollutants and deploying both regional and city scale models to study and improve understanding of the mechanisms/processes driving pollutant’s concentration in the atmosphere, their spatial distribution and temporal trends, their source apportionment and variability.

Earth system processes and climate – exploiting observations at urban and remote environments (within the PANACEA NRI and ACTRIS ESFRI) to support research on climate relevant atmospheric constituents (e.g. greenhouse gases, black carbon, dust) and their effects on climatic parameters (e.g. radiation, temperature). This is combined with growing capacity in numerical modeling that includes: earth system modeling (ESM), to investigate the potential ocean biogeochemistry perturbations due to changes in atmospheric deposition, for the past and future atmosphere; simulations of the physicochemical atmospheric interactions on the regional scale, to identify the effects of atmospheric aerosols on radiation, cloud properties and atmospheric temperature; and, city scale modeling, to place emphasis on the complex urban environment.

Environment and health –  aiming at the generation of exposure data and geospatial fields for use in health studies to investigate causal links between exposure and effects, elucidating biologically plausible mechanisms that follow inhalation exposure.

Earth observation, policy and urban perspectives – developing synergies between the different EO platforms (i.e. satellites, in situ, models, citizen observatories), while at the same time pursuing the exploitation of European and international assets (e.g. Copernicus, GEOSS) to deliver added value services and products to citizens and stakeholders.

APCG operates the Greek GEO Office, the focal point of GEO activities in Greece, which has as a main goal to exploit EO capacities to serve the four GEO’s Engagement Priorities, namely Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction, Sustainable Development Goals and Urban Resilience. For this, it leads national strategic planning towards meeting national priorities and GEO’s regional vision; provides reference and optimizes efforts for coordinating EO activities and capacities; promotes EO information as an enabler for informed decision making and raises public awareness on the benefits of EO; maximizes synergies amongst key EO partners in Greece, placing special effort in engaging user communities, stakeholders and the industry sector (including SMEs); plays up the leadership of the Greek EO actors in various domains at the international stage; identifies and triggers exploitation of synergies in terms of funds raising, capacities and cross-discipline research, via community building and networking; and fosters the exploitation of best practices between EO players at the national level.