Internship offer: Spatial drivers of atmospheric NH3 in north-west Europe based on long-term observations

**Laboratory: Centre of Education, Research and Innovation on Energy and Environment (CERI EE)** **Supervisors:** Anna FONT **Type of contract and duration:** Research internship – 6 months **Workplace: Bourseul Campus, Douai, France** **Context:** IMT Nord Europe is a public higher-education and research institution belonging to the Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) group, under the supervision of the French Ministry of Industry. Its missions include engineering education, scientific research, and innovation in support of sustainable territorial development. For more details, please visit: www.imt-nord-europe.fr/en This internship will be carried out within the CERI EE at IMT Nord Europe, in the research axis *“Observations, Sources and Processes in the Atmosphere” (OSPA)*. The host team develops advanced experimental and data-analysis approaches to characterize atmospheric aerosols, their sources, and their impacts on air quality and health. The work will fit within the CDP AREA project (Aérosols au cœur du système Terre-Atmosphère), funded by the University of Lille. The AREA project aims to improve the measurement of complex interactions between aerosols and gaseous precursors with the environment across different spatial and temporal scales. Its ultimate goal is to deepen our understanding of aerosol behaviour in the atmosphere and improve atmospheric and climate models. **Ammonia (NH3)** is the most abundant alkaline gas in the atmosphere playing a crucial role in the neutralization of atmospheric acids leading to particle formation (Seinfeld and Pandis, 2006). Further, wet and dry deposition of NH3 to soils, water bodies and ecosystems leads to acidification, eutrophication and biodiversity loss (Asman et al., 1998). Most NH3 emissions in Europe are from agricultural and farming activities but also waste handling, road transportation and residential heating (EEA, 2018). The increase in temperature associated with global warming is expected to increase NH3 emissions worldwide in the next century (Jiang et al., 2026) with new potential emissions such as green fuel. Therefore, it is crucial to identify and quantify the drivers of NH3 atmospheric concentrations (emissions, meteorology and other environmental factors) to define efficient NH3 reduction policies. Ground-level NH3 monitoring is sparse. The longest and widest NH3 monitoring in Europe are in the Netherlands (van Zanten et al., 2017) and in the United Kingdom (Tang et al., 2018) with programs starting in the mid-1990s. However, the number of monitoring programs have increased and currently exist in Belgium, France and Spain (Liu et al., 2024). Despite increasing ground-level monitoring, the influence of non-agricultural emissions on atmospheric NH3 is still unknown. To overcome the spatial limitations of ground-level NH3 monitoring, satellite observations could be used to fill the gaps. Currently, NH3 from IASI (Van Damme et al., 2015) and CrIS (Shephard et al., 2020) are avail