Activities in congested urban areas all over the world were reduced this spring as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a few aircraft have continued to fly. As such, Earth’s atmosphere is significantly less polluted by emissions from human transport and industrial activities than it was previously. In the BLUESKY mission, scientists are investigating how clean the air has become during the pandemic, and whether the sky actually appears to be bluer. Christiane Voigt of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is heavily involved in the project and is responsible for the scientific deployment of the DLR Falcon 20E. In this interview, she tells us how the Coronavirus pandemic is providing a special opportunity for atmospheric research, how aircraft are able to conduct measurements just three metres above the ground, about instruments that can be controlled by scientists working from home, and about the first trends revealed by the measurements.
Interview by Falk Dambowsky
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