• 35.518°N 12.630°E 45 m a.s.l.

Observational platform

Italy

• National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA)

https://www.lampedusa.enea.it/

• Giandomenico Pace
  Facility PI

The ENEA Station for Climate Observations is a research facility in the Mediterranean dedicated to measurements of climatic parameters.
It is located on the island of Lampedusa a small, rocky island approximately 100 km east of Tunisia, and 200 km north of Libya. The island is 10 km wide, has a surface area of about 20 km2, and its maximum elevation is 120 m.
The Station for Climate Observations is an integrated observatory composed by three sections:
• a ground-based Atmospheric Observatory (35.52°N, 12.63°E) located on the northwestern far end of the island near the lighthouse of Capo Grecale. This Observatory has been operational since 1997 and hosts both the aerosol and cloud remote sensing instrumentation of the ACTRIS national facility.
• an open sea Oceanographic Observatory (35.49°N, 12.47°E), which is an instrumented buoy installed in August 2015.
• a Terrestrial Ecosystem Observatory (35.53°N, 12.53°E) in the western part of the island installed in spring 2023.

The main objectives of the ENEA Station are the study of climate variability in the Mediterranean, the sea-atmosphere interaction, and the impact of atmospheric constituents on the radiative budget.
Due to its geographical characteristics Lampedusa is an ideal background site, particularly suitable for the evaluation of long-range transport phenomena, satellite validation and process studies.
The station started at the end of the ‘90s for the monitoring of climate-changing gases, but over the years it has evolved to study how also the other atmospheric components (aerosols and clouds) alter the radiative balance.
It is currently the only station of ICOS Research Infrastructure, RI, to host the components for atmospheric, marine and ecosystem measurements, it is in entering in the Baseline Surface Radiation Network and is a national facility of the EMSO RI.
A partial list of the instruments deployed at the Station is reported on the website https://www.lampedusa.enea.it/strumenti.