| Fifteen thousand excess deaths in the heat wave of summer 2003 showed that Europe lacks operational capabilities to provide adequate medium-range (3-7 day) #Amp; short-range (1-3 day) forecasts for natural disasters involving atmospheric chemistry #Amp; dynamics. This proposal, GEMS, will create new European operational capabilities for medium-range #Amp; short-range air-chemistry forecasts, through much improved exploitation of satellite data.The GEMS consortium comprises ten regional centres, most with operational responsibilities for regional air-quality forecasting, ten leading research labs with capabilities #Amp; models on all aspects of atmospheric chemistry, two leading European labs, ECMWF with global operational weather capabilities, #Amp; the EU's JRC with global diagnostic capabilities.The research teams #Amp; ECMWF will develop a global operational medium-range forecast / assimilation capability for dynamics #Amp; composition, exploiting all available satellite data. The global forecasts will provide key information on long-range transport of air pollutants to the regional forecast models, through the forecast boundary conditions used by the regional systems.The improved regional forecasts will be used by air-quality authorities at city level, in dozens of cities across Europe. Based on the best science, the integrated forecast / assimilation capability will provide a powerful monitoring capability for greenhouse gases, reactive gases and aerosols. Sophisticated new inversion methods will be developed to infer surface fluxes of CO2 and other species through use of the surface flask data with the grided atmospheric fields on transport #Amp; composition.The GEMS project will produce global retrospective analyses of the atmospheric dynamics and composition for the troposphere #Amp; stratosphere, and will be able to assess the impact of changes both on global #Amp; regional scale, examining extremes as well as means. The real-time #Amp; retros. |