This summer, as wildfire smoke blankets large swaths of North America and heat-stoked summer haze reaches its seasonal peak, NASA and its partners are deploying several new tools to observe air quality and pollution from the street to the stratosphere. Launched into orbit earlier this spring, TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is the first satellite instrument that will measure air quality over North America hourly (during daylight hours) and at the resolution of a few square miles. Its field of view stretches from Mexico City to central Canada and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. NASA’s newest atmospheric chemistry instrument will soon begin transmitting data for scientific use.
Meanwhile, some 22,000 miles below, a separate NASA mission will complement the new satellite measurements with air quality observations from the field. The summer 2023 campaign includes a fleet of aircraft, laboratories on wheels, weather balloons, and hundreds of scientists who have mobilized to track pollution in unprecedented detail. That mission, Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science (STAQS), is examining the air we breathe in several North American population centers: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The goal is to map air pollutants from the ground to the upper troposphere, track where they come from and how they change hour by hour, and identify neighborhoods disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air.
One of the key pollutants the STAQS team and TEMPO will monitor is nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, which is commonly emitted by tailpipes and smokestacks and a key ingredient in ground-level ozone, or smog. The missions will also measure fine particulate matter, volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde, and methane and carbon dioxide, which are potent greenhouse gases that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere. The STAQS team isn’t operating alone. NOAA is leading the complementary AEROMMA field campaign to study air pollution this summer, one of several government and university-led efforts. With collaborators from more than 20 universities, several regional consortiums, state and local governments, plus NOAA, NASA, and other federal agencies, scientists are working together to “build a coast-to-coast air quality community that’s stronger than the sum of its parts,” Lefer said.
