German ministry supports ATTO tower projects for climate research in the Amazon

The establishment of the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) as an exceptional research infrastructure, supported jointly by Brazil and Germany, has been led by Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, with the help of Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. After its successful set-up, ATTO now includes 3 towers, a research field station and permanent research plots. The large 325 m tower is the tallest research tower in South America.

The next phase of the Brazilian-German collaboration project aims at fully exploiting the technical ATTO infrastructure, to study the role of Amazon tropical forests in the Earth system and fill a large gap in global climate monitoring networks. From the German side, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funds a large 3-year network proposal starting May 2017 on climate-relevant projects in this key tropical region. The German institutions, collaborating with Brazilian partners, include:

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena (coordinator)
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz
Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
University Hamburg
Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, KIT