Action Period: 25-10-2022 to 24-10-2026

The main aim and objective of the Action is to establish a network involving institutions, instrument developers, scientific and commercial end users, in order to improve, homogenise and valorise aerosol retrievals, using mainly solar and sky but also lunar and star photometers from different networks.

The main objective of Harmonia is the homogenization and harmonization of global aerosol measurements and retrievals. To achieve this goal networking is a key aspect since different instruments/networks and related algorithms have to be unified. During the fist two years of Harmonia Action we managed to create a network of 138 members dealing with aerosol sun photometry and aerosol remote sensing. Harmnonia has organized two schools for EIC researchers, workshops for stakeholders and a Harmonia session in the European Meteorological Society conference 2024 with 19 oral and 12 poster Harmonia related presentations. In addition, during the first two years 17 publications have been acknowledging Harmonia related work.
Main work in Harmonia is aimed towards:
- Increasing the interactions between a large number of atmospheric aerosol network measurement scientists and users;
- Try to standardize and improve the existing aerosol products and tools;
- Increase the applicability of aerosol products through linking networks, users by demonstrating benefits of using such atmospheric products,
- Try to link researchers and instrument manufacturers, towards innovation actions on current and future photometric-aerosol instrumentation.

Harmonia is based in two axis. One is the scientific and technological work towards gathering and homogenizing data and measurements. The second has to do with the exploitation and use of this knowledge to data user communities and also to instrument and software developers. In the first two years major effort have been put in the first axis, while during the remaining period of the Harmonia "lifetime", the challenge is to communicate all these efforts in the related stakeholders. It is foreseen that workshops towards both data users and industrial parties will be included in the Harmonia schedule. Two of them are foreseen for the 3rd year and also another two for the last year of Harmonia.

The ACM2 team is involved with contributing data and expertise related to the Brewer ozone spectrophotometer, mainly with the spectral Aerosol Optical Depth derived from the instruments. Alexander Mangold is member of the HARMONIA Management Committee and member in Working Group 1. The HARMONIA webpage can be accessed here.

Action period: 29/10/2019 - 28/10/2023

The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is the layer closest to the Earth's surface within which most human activities take place. The vertical profile of atmospheric thermodynamic parameters in the ABL impacts weather, air quality, and climate. Surface sensor networks and satellite observations do not provide sufficient information on the high temporal variability and strong vertical gradients experienced in the ABL. Thus, despite its importance, ABL remains the single most important under-sampled part of the atmosphere. This observational gap currently hampers our ability to improve weather forecasts, air quality prediction, and climate model parameterization. However, this gap is mainly due to the lack of S&T networking and coordination. In fact, state-of-the-art ground-based remote sensing instruments able to provide ABL profiles (such as temperature, humidity, wind, aerosol, cloud) are currently deployed at numerous sites in Europe, but the harmonization of data and procedures is missing, limiting the effective use and societal benefits of the existing ABL profiling data. This Action aims to fill this gap, bridging user needs and the S&T expertise residing in industry and academia. This will be achieved through:

• Capacity building of instrument operators to improve the use of state-of-the-art ABL profiling instruments
• Fostering coordination between operational agencies and academia to tailor measurement networks for well identified applications
• Enhancing pan-European research coordination to develop new products and tools for data assimilation and long time series reanalysis
• Identifying knowledge brokers enabling rapid exchange between academia, operational agencies, industry and end-users to ensure full exploitation for societal benefit.

Our team is mostly involved with the development of new and improved ABL products from the synergy of ABL profiling instruments. More specifically, Q. Laffineur is a member of the Management Committee.

The Action's homepage can be found here and more information is also available from the Action's webpage on the COST website.