CNES projects library

December 12, 2018

Aeris

AERIS gathers and validates atmosphere data and puts them into a uniform format for research and commercial purposes. It acts as a hub connecting four centres, measuring systems, research laboratories and scientific expertise to disseminate and archive these data.

Operating within the framework of the Earth System research infrastructure, AERIS delivers atmosphere data and services throughout France and Europe.

For this purpose, its mission is to provide easy and centralized access. When a satellite collects raw atmospheric data, they are stored on the ground and then processed to extract useful information, like for example amounts of water ice observed in clouds by the French-U.S. Calipso satellite.

This information is provided in the form of products that are readily useable for research or commercial applications. AERIS handles the storage, validation, calibration and uniform formatting of these data through four centres:

  • ESPRI, the research services mesocentre at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute (IPSL) in Paris, with servers at Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC) and the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school.
  • ICARE, based in Lille since 2003, is a large centre for atmosphere data and products, holding more than 100 million files and 3,700 Terabytes of data consultable on line.
  • SEDOO, based in Toulouse, is the Midi-Pyrenees Observatory’s data centre with resources dedicated to conceiving and developing data management, processing and distribution applications.
  • SATMOS, the satellite data archiving and meteorological processing centre, directly receives data from satellites in low Earth and geostationary orbit and generates associated products. SATMOS is based in Lannion (Brittany), co-located with the Space Weather Centre of national weather service Meteo-France.

AERIS has an expert team of some 40 people and is also able to call on networks of research laboratories and other experts to develop and use new algorithms and prototype products.

Whether for atmospheric survey campaigns operating precursors to new satellite instruments (PreCoMet), for data on cloud composition in the Arctic to study the impact of pollution or for establishing data centres for a European atmospheric and astrophysical observation project (HEMERA), AERIS is a vital support and organization structure for the atmospheric science community.

See the AERIS website

Contact

Thierry Tremas thierry.tremas at cnes.fr TEL: +33 (0)5 61 28 20 40