A new research infrastructure to decipher the greenhouse gas balance of Europe and adjacent regions

Activities

The ICOS work plan of the preparatory phase is organised around eight complementary work packages:

WP 1 corresponds to the consortium organization and management of the project,

WP 2 provides legal and governance models,

WP 3 coordinates the  financial/fund raising work,

WP 4 considers the integration of essential external datasets into ICOS, and involves data providers, in particular for fossil fuel emission data and biomass and soil carbon inventories,

WP 5 corresponds the technical work to build the distributed network of field sites, including  network design, equipment selection, testing and optimisation,

WP 6 will carry out the preparation for building the atmospheric and ecosystem thematic centers, as well as the central analytical laboratory,

WP 7 will apply the technical solutions retained in WP 5-6, to execute the Demonstration Experiment, a one-year test run where the infrastructure will be operated with a small number of sites,

WP 8 will organize the project-level outreach, the construction of the web based Carbon Portal, as well as training and capacity building necessary for the future operational phase.