The PEEX Headquarters (PEEX-HQ) Helsinki organized a virtual-meeting as a tele-conference on 7th May 2020. The tele-conference was opened by the plenary talk on “PEEX potential: Comprehensive observations, science diplomacy, COVID19″ by Academician Markku Kulmala. Kulmala addressed new air quality results and findings from Beijing, China during COVID-19, the importance of continuous measurements, and the role of science diplomacy to find solutions to these types of global challenges. Altogether 17 oral presentations and 24 shorter poster presentations were delivered during the tele-conference (with ~100 participants attending worldwide). The cross-cutting themes of the PEEX session were “large scale land – atmosphere feedbacks and interactions”, “atmospheric aerosols & greenhouse gases” and “risks related to forest fires and environmental health”, including a series of talks for oral/poster presentations on the atmosphere, land, hydrosphere, in-situ and remote sensing measurements, modelling, knowledge transfer, international collaboration, education, and communication topics linked to the PEEX community activities.
The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Programme,initiated in 2012, is an asset to its founding institute INAR at the University of Helsinki and to its international partners, as it provides high international visibility, attracts further research collaboration and up-scales the scientific impact in various arenas. This was apparent from the wide scope of talks during the conference. The invited talk by Prof. Torben Christensen (Aarhus University, Denmark) dealt with the centennial scale environmental change at key arctic observational sites. It was highlighted that we have valuable historical archival data to detect changes in glacier, terrestrial and near-coastal environments. Another example is the Big Earth Data (BED) enhance and the implementation of PEEX along the Belt and Road regions. Dr. Ybao Qui (RADI, China) introduced BED and it’s platform development. Data on the changing snow and ice, vegetation and ecosystem, and natural disasters are of primary interest. PEEX has the potential to facilitate the in situ stations network development of the region.
The following day 08 May 2020, the PEEX Special Session at EGU20 continued with EGU Displays Live-chat that allowed for interactive questions and answers via a texting platform (more than 100 questions for about 50 presentations, and reaching an audience of ~90 participants). Many questions dealt with the ongoing studies, measurements and data availability from various regions of the Arctic-boreal domain, and especially for in-situ sites in Siberia (Zotino Tall Tower Observatory) in central Siberia and Arctic territories.
It is already evident that the era of COVID-19 will generate new, exceptional results, e.g how the reduced anthropogenic and traffic emissions will affect the air quality, or how the change is observed in the Arctic. Prof. Alexander Baklanov (PEEX Special Session co-chair, PEEX Steering Committee, World Meteorological Organization) invited the audience to respond to WMO survey on the ongoing research during COVIC-19 times see also more details at the WMO page).
PEEX research results have been published in the PEEX Special Issue in Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP), the J. Geography, Environment, Sustainability and in the Journal of Big Data. PEEX-HQ is encouraging all the presenters and participants of the PEEX EGU sessions to submit their research findings to the ACP PEEX Special Issue.
In 2019 PEEX started comprehensive analysis on the first results covering the last five year period based on a compilation of the published peer-review papers and results obtained from the PEEX geographical domain of interests. The aim of this analysis is to evaluate the state-of-the-art research outcomes versus the PEEX large-scale research questions and key topics addressed by the PEEX Science Plan. To facilitate the direct input from the research community, we have asked researchers to answer a questionnaire where they could list their main scientific results and activities (which they considered relevant to PEEX region) and also include ancillary information (such as type of activity or geographical extent). The collected metadata on publications cover information from over 400 scientific papers. Currently, the analysis is in progress. PEEX-HQ would like to thank all researchers who have contributed to this work,. All those who are still interested to contribute to the PEEX scientific overview, please, contact to Dr. Hanna K. Lappalainen – hanna.k.lappalainen(at)Helsinki.fi.
We also encourage – the PEEX community members –as well as those who are intersted to join- to actively take part in the communication and knowledge transfer flows that PEEX HQ has to offer, such as the PEEX e-newsletter as well as and the PEEX Blog. Please contact Dr. Stephany Mazon – stephany.mazon(at)helsinki.fi for more details..
We hope that the PEEX community also finds useful the new and upcoming datasets like those produced by the Horizon-2020 iCUPE project ( PI – Prof. Tuukka Petaja) for the Arctic regions (https://www.atm.helsinki.fi/icupe/index.php/datasets/delivered-datasets). We are also welcoming new stations to join the PEEX Russian in-situ stations e-catalog. Please, contact Dr. Alexander Mahura – alexander.mahura(at)helsinki.fi for more information.
With many thanks on your active participation and contributions!
The PEEX at EGU2020 organizers,
Hanna Lappalainen, Alexander Mahura, Stephany Mazon
PEEX Blog 