Two weeks in China

Hello,

some while a go me and my buddy Prof. Dongxu Yang got a joint Finland-China cooperation project together. He got the money from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to travel to Finland and I got the money from the Research council of Finland to travel to China.

During the COVID-19 it was difficult to travel. But finally, after a long wait, I got to travel to China in September 2023. The travel plan was quite simple: The first week I would be visiting Dongxu at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), CAS, and the second one we would be in the ESA-MOST DRAGON symposium in Inner Mongolia.

The first week was full of interesting discussions with many different people. For example, I got to see the drone equipment and we had discussions how they are planning to estimate CO₂ emissions from power plants and validate satellite-based results. They plan to use cross-sectional flux methods, as I have done in my own research. I was happy to see that they use sensors from the Finnish Vaisala company.

I also got to speak about my work on the IAP seminar. After the seminar, I had some nice discussion about my work with Kai Wu who has previously worked on MicroCarb project at the University of Edinburgh. Actually, surprisingly many of the people I met, have worked there. At IAP they have many seminars. On the same day that I gave my seminar presentation, we went to see some AI/ML seminar by some famous Chinese scientist. The seminar was in Chinese, so I couldn’t follow much even though the slides were in English.

The week was also full of interesting dinners with interesting people and some sightseeing of course. I also got the visit the Earth Lab with Dongxu. During my visit the institute also had its 95th birthday and during weekend they had big celebration at the Earth Lab.

On Sunday evening me, Dongxu and Prof. Liu traveled together on a high-speed train to Inner Mongolia’s capital Hohhot where the DRAGON symposium takes place. The train stations in China seem like airports and trains like airplanes. In general, on a technological level, it seems that Chinese people are ahead of Europeans. For example, everything is paid and done on a mobile app.

On Monday, Prof. Liu organized a Workshop on China-EU GHGs measurement from Space. I also got to present my work and we had discussions on co-operations between European Copernicus CO2M and China’s TanSat-2 missions.

Tuesday marked the official opening of the DRAGON Symposium and the symposium started with some traditional Inner Mongolian music. During the poster session I had interesting discussions with Qiangian Zhang, who has done similar work that I have. I also presented a paper poster.

Wednesday was our DRAGON project main day, and Prof. Liu presented the project very well. We also prepared a summary slide of our work that Ronald van der A presented at the final session summaries. Our recommendations to ESA and MOST were:

1. High-level co-operation between TanSat-2 and Copernicus CO2M missions to be organized by ESA and MOST
2. TanSat-2 to be included as an ESA Third Party Mission

On Friday afternoon I took a train back to Beijing with a fantastic duo from IAP/CAS: Lu Yao and Yuli Zhang. After the train arrived at Beijing, they were kind enough to put me in taxi on towards the airport hotel. On Saturday morning I started my journey back to Europe and on Sunday at 1:30 a.m. I arrived home. Then I rested.

Thank you!

Janne