ICOS – National Observation Service ICOS France Atmosphere (SIFA)

The project

ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System) is a European Research Infrastructure for measuring atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and fluxes on ecosystems and the ocean. As the increase in greenhouse gases is the main cause of climate change, the interest of ICOS is to allow, in the long term, the monitoring of their sources and sinks. This monitoring will provide verification of emissions and sinks independent of fossil emission inventories and land use data.
The ICOS infrastructure mobilises more than 500 researchers and engineers from 17 European countries; it is a key element of the European Research Infrastructure Roadmap (ESFRI) and constitutes a Very Large Research Instrument (TGIR) of the French national research strategy. The French part of ICOS is coordinated by the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE) which depends on CEA, CNRS, UVSQ and INRA.

Observations

The SIFA National Observation Service (SNO) is in charge of France’s atmospheric contribution. It is made up of sixteen measuring stations, nine of which are in metropolitan France. Five of these stations are labelled in the European ICOS-ERIC infrastructure. The others are labelled in the SNO as national ICOS-France stations. The same measurement protocols are deployed in all stations.
ICOS includes centralised thematic centres for data processing, sample analysis and development of measurement protocols. The ICOS-ERIC Atmospheric Topic Centre (ATC) is operated by France at LSCE. It includes the European metrology laboratory for the evaluation of measurement instruments and protocols, and the ICOS atmospheric measurement data centre.

Data portal

AERIS is currently developing the SNO SIFA data portal which will distribute data from the 11 French stations that are not present in ICOS-ERIC

Data from ICOS-ERIC stations are published on the ICOS Carbon Portal.