European Space Assets Boost Air Quality Monitoring New Generation of Copernicus and EUMETSAT Satellites Delivers High-Resolution Pollution Tracking

Europe is enhancing its space-based air quality monitoring capabilities with the deployment of advanced Copernicus and EUMETSAT satellites, including the Airbus-built Sentinel-4 and MetOp-SG A. These platforms will deliver more frequent, higher-resolution atmospheric data, improving forecasts and enabling faster public health responses.

Air quality is a critical environmental and public health concern. The World Health Organization attributes approximately 600,000 premature deaths annually in Europe—and around seven million worldwide—to air pollution. Sources range from fossil fuel combustion, road traffic, and industrial emissions to natural phenomena such as Saharan dust storms and wildfires.

Monitoring these pollutants poses scientific and technical challenges. Pollutants can transform chemically and disperse rapidly, influenced by wind patterns, sunlight, and temperature inversions. To produce accurate air quality forecasts, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), uses sophisticated chemical transport models. These simulate atmospheric processes and are continuously refined through data assimilation—the integration of real-time observations into model forecasts every 12 hours, enabling five-day predictions with improved accuracy.

CAMS currently uses data from satellites such as Sentinel-5P, which measures ozone (O₃), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), carbon monoxide (CO), and sulphur dioxide (SO₂), and Sentinel-3, which monitors aerosol optical depth and detects vegetation fires. These datasets support pollution source identification and event tracking. In May and June 2025, CAMS tracked Canadian wildfire smoke plumes crossing the Atlantic, coinciding with Saharan dust transport over Europe on 13 June. It also reported elevated ground-level ozone episodes across Europe in June—ozone that, unlike its stratospheric counterpart, damages respiratory health and vegetation.

In July 2025, the Airbus-built Sentinel-4 instrument was launched aboard the Meteosat Third Generation Sounder (MTG-S1) satellite. Sentinel-4 will provide hourly, high-resolution data on key pollutants over Europe—an improvement over the daily snapshots from Sentinel-5P—enabling diurnal cycle modelling and more frequent model updates.

Further enhancements will come from MetOp-SG A, equipped with six instruments, including Airbus’ Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI-NG) for ammonia detection and EUMETSAT’s Sentinel-5 spectrometer. The latter offers spectral sensitivity far exceeding human vision, detecting trace gases, aerosols, and UV index values on a daily basis.

These new capabilities will expand European environmental monitoring, supporting government alerts, regulatory compliance, policy development, and climate research. Public-facing platforms, such as the Windy app, already integrate CAMS data, allowing citizens to access real-time air quality visualisations for pollutants including NO_₂ and fine particulate matter (PM_₂.₅).

By delivering more frequent, detailed, and wide-ranging atmospheric data, Europe’s next-generation satellites represent a major step forward in understanding and forecasting air quality, with direct benefits for public health, environmental protection, and climate science.