Environment & Climate Department

Welcoming note

Thank you for taking the time to learn about the Environment & Climate Department on our website. On behalf of the entire Environment & Climate team, I would like to welcome you.

The Environment & Climate has at its core the ground-based remote-sensing supersite (GBS) for calibration/validation, aerosol and cloud monitoring. Combining the GBS with spaceborne sensors, the department will enable measurements of the atmospheric state, pollution levels, dust monitoring and further applications in applied research of agriculture, water and land use in four thematic areas:

Atmosphere: Observation of atmospheric processes in EMMENA requires process resolving aerosol, cloud and precipitation profiling, trend analysis, and other techniques to be conducted over decades. In this way, the ECoE contributes to the understanding of future impact of climate change on EMMENA and perform complex research on aerosol-cloud-dynamics-precipitation interaction.

Agriculture: Efficient and timely agriculture monitoring will offer tremendous benefits to the region including control of imposed agriculture policies, increased agricultural productivity, early warning systems, consistent monitoring of food security metrics, damage assessment and mitigation strategies for extreme weather events (i.e., droughts or floods).

Water: Cyprus provides the ideal environment for implementing climate observation technologies in a key region of climate change, which is expected to attract leading researchers in the field of water resources. By exploiting high resolution dense time series for large scale water application, improved water management strategies and policies will be developed. Water shortages, droughts, climate change and desertification in EMMENA will be better understood through capacity building and knowledge transfer.

Land: The combination of EO, remote sensing and geographic information service (GIS) techniques will be used for land-cover characterization of forests, monitoring of forest fires and other environmental issues. The assessment of this set of information over time will enable the comprehensive monitoring of natural land resources on Cyprus.