An Overview of the Atlas Field Campaign in Morocco (North-West Africa) in September-October 2019
Abstract
The Atlas Experiment, is a MARSU (Marine Atmospheric Science Unravelled: Analytical and mass spectrometric techniques development and application) project field campaign, which took place on the central region of Morocco (Fes-Meknes Region) from September 15th to October 15th, 2019. The goal of the campaign was to collect detailed atmospheric measurements that can be used to evaluate and characterise, for the first time in that African area, the chemical air composition and evaluate the contribution from the local emissions and from the transported air masses from Sahara, Atlantic and Europe. Measurements were performed in two urban sites within the city of Fes (over 1.25 million inhabitants) and one site in the remote area of Michlifen in the Middle Atlas Mountains (2000 m altitude) about 70 km south of Fes city. The deployment of a large set of instrumentation enabled to characterise the aerosols chemical composition in the three sites as well as trace-gases species. The high concentrations measured for a series of pollutants in both sites at the city of Fes indicated that local emissions have a large contribution to the pollution events observed during the campaign. On the other hand, the measurements at the remote site (Mohammed V observatory, AMV) showed that chemical composition at this high-altitude site is influenced by both regional and trans-regional transport of emissions. MARSU project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 690958