What is the history of ACTRIS?
ACTRIS results from a construction effort of more than 15-yr engaged by both member states and the European commission through the Research Infrastructure programme. ACTRIS was initiated as an Integrated Initiative in 2011 building on three historical European research collaborations: EARLINET (European Aerosol Research Lidar Network, EU-FP5 and FP6 projects), EUSAAR (European Supersites for Atmospheric Aerosol Research, EU-FP6 project), CREATE (Construction, use and delivery of an European aerosol database, EU-FP5 project) and CLOUDnet (started as an EU-FP5 project for observing cloud profiles), to which a new integration of long-term trace-gas observatories was then added. The operations will be pursued as part of ACTRIS-2 funded as a new IA programme by the European commission in H2020.
The short-lived components of NDACC (Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change) will be incorporated in the Research Infrastructure ACTRIS also building on advances made in the NORS program. Many of the observatories in ACTRIS are collocated with EMEP, GAW and GRUAN sites, and in many cases started observations prior to the mentioned EU projects in quasi-independent initiatives. In addition, a few facilities, such as large simulation chambers are proposed as National Facilities, and have been operating for years within the EUROCHAMP projects.
The history of ACTRIS started more than 15 years ago..
Amongst the achievements of the 15-yr construction plan is the complex data-stream from data collected through the routine operations of the National Facilities, their quality assurance and their use in higher level data products distributed through the Data Centre, featuring search engines, multi- pass data selection, graphical views of data and data products, some of them in near real-time. It is also the very high quality data provided that facilitated research of a very large community of users worldwide.