Special award for Pieternel Levelt and OMI satellite instrument team

Pieternel Levelt (Professor at TU Delft and Head at KNMI) and her international team were recently awarded a special award by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for their successful OMI satellite project. The AMS awards recognise outstanding individuals and organisations in the field of weather, water and climate research.

The award was presented to the OMI team for the outstanding international cooperation that has led to innovative satellite observations of great importance for air quality research and public health applications. Pieternel Levelt is scientific leader of the OMI project.

Pieternel Levelt: 'OMI has been contributing to the monitoring of the ozone layer, air quality and climate from space for almost 17 years. Because we have been measuring for 17 years - a record - we have a unique dataset. With all this data, we can conduct research into changes in emissions worldwide. This award is a recognition for the international team that has worked together over the last 20 years to make OMI a success.

Read more about Pieternel's research in Stories of Science. In her story 'Globally mapping air pollution', you can read what she has been able to do with the data obtained from OMI and its successor TROPOMI so far, for example during the corona crisis.

OMI project
OMI is a Dutch satellite instrument that has been in orbit around the Earth since 2004 on board NASA's Aura satellite and measures the composition of the global atmosphere.  KNMI is the scientific leader of the OMI project and is responsible for quality control and the development of data products.

In 2019, the team behind the successful OMI satellite project received the William T. Pecora Award, an award presented by NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to individuals or teams who have made an extraordinary contribution to understanding the Earth through remote sensing.