From the beginning of the Neolithic revolution up 1800 A.D., the earth’s human population is estimated to have risen from several million nomadic hunter gathers to 1 Billion rural settlement and city dwellers. This rapid development is dwarfed by the impact of the industrial revolution over the past two centuries. There are no over 7 Billion people on earth with over half living in cities, e.g. there are ~ 3 billion more citizens since I was bron. This industrialisation and urbanisation has been fuelled by the use of cheap energy from fossil fuel combustion. It has resulted in large scale changes in land use, air pollution, and the destruction of stratospheric ozone, the anthropogenic modification of biogeochemical cycling, the destruction of species, ecosystems and ecosystem services. In order to test our knowledge and understanding of the Earth system, accurate long term global measurements of atmospheric constituents and surface parameters are essential.
The remote sounding of the atmosphere from instrumentation on satellite platforms provides a unique opportunity to retrieve regional and global observations of key trace atmospheric constituents (gases, aerosol and clouds) and surface parameters (ocean colour, ice extent, flora etc.). This talk describes results from the SCIAMACHY (SCanning Imaging Absorption spectrometer for Atmospheric CHartographY) project and its spin offs, GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment), GOME-2, and their successors ESA Sentinel 4 (GeoSCIA), Sentinel 5, CarbonSat and SCIA-ISS. The interpretation of the data from these instruments has provided a paradigm shift in our understanding of global atmospheric composition. In addition they deliver unique evidence for the development and verification of international environmental policy.