EU Research Projects

The Global Mercury Observation System (2010-2015)

The Global Mercury Observation System (GMOS) is a five year project, funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme (DG Research). More than twenty institutions from Europe, North and South Americas, Asia and Africa take part in the project as well as ten external advisors. The project was launched in the fall of 2010 and is aimed at:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

General structure of the GMOS project

 

  • Establishment of a global monitoring system for mercury including land-based, over-water and aircraft observations;
  • Improvement and validation of regional and global scale atmospheric mercury models;
  • Model application to evaluate source-receptor relationships, temporal trends and scenarios;
  • Development of interoperable system for dissemination of the project output data.

GMOS will closely cooperate with major international programs including the UNEP Global Partnership Area on Atmospheric Mercury Transport and Fate Research (UNEP F&T), the Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollutants (TF HTAP) of the LRTAP Convention, the GEO Task HE-09-02d "Global Monitoring Plan for Atmospheric Mercury" and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).

MSC-E as a leader of one of the project work packages (WP7) co-ordinates the modelling activities on a global scale as well as takes part in the regional scale model assessment (WP8). The modelling consortium of the project consists of five global/hemispheric models and three regional scale models from different scientific groups of Europe and North America. The program of model development and application includes a variety of tasks:

  • Update of modelling approaches and coupling global and regional-scale models;
  • Utilizing measurement data for model evaluation and improvement;
  • Model applications for the present-day conditions and reproduction of historical trends;
  • Evaluation of mercury intercontinental transport patterns and contribution of global sources to mercury deposition in Europe;
  • Forecasting mercury concentration and deposition patterns as well as source-receptor relationships for selected emission scenarios;
  • Uncertainty analysis of the modelling results.