NASA’s mission: Track pollution’s fingerprints
Langley scientists prepare for Asian air quality research trip
NASA Langley’s Gulfstream III is a small plane, but for research scientist Laura Judd, it’s an airborne command center.
At her usual seat, the last chair on the left, a gleaming wooden tabletop folds out of a compartment under the window. Her laptop and headset ready her for pathbreaking air quality research.
“This aircraft can be thought of as a satellite on an airplane,” Judd said. “But we measure at a much higher spatial resolution than what we get from a satellite.”
Judd is part of a roughly 20-person team from NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton that will join about 200 total NASA personnel and hundreds of international researchers and other contacts on a mission: the airborne and satellite investigation of Asian air quality — or ASIA-AQ. NASA researchers said this study involves the most ambitious international cooperation the agency has ever undertaken for research of this kind.
“Our job is to understand the globe,” said NASA Langley’s Jim Crawford, the study’s lead scientist. “What’s put in the atmosphere in Asia makes its way to the U.S. There are a lot of impacts that are at global scale.”
In the coming weeks, the research team will leave for a two-month trip through Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and, hopefully, Taiwan. They’ll have two weeks
“I typically think of air pollution as three things: what you’re putting into the air, so emissions; the chemistry, so creating new pollutants from those emissions; and then, the meteorology. Where is the weather carrying it?”
— NASA research scientist Laura Judd
in each country to accomplish four flight days, which require clear weather.
“I typically think of air pollution as three things: what you’re putting into the air, so emissions; the chemistry, so creating new pollutants from those emissions; and then, the meteorology,” Judd said. “Where is the weather carrying it?”
Equipment operators and techs packed into the narrow Gulfstream jet Wednesday at NASA Langley to install the two major pieces of equipment to prepare for its scheduled Jan. 28 departure. Those instruments, the second-generation high-spectral-resolution lidar and the geostationary coastal and air pollution events simulator, measure sunlight reflected from the Earth to detect the unique “fingerprints” that pollutants leave in the light.
Researchers will meet the jet and NASA’s larger airborne lab, the DC-8, which will take physical samples of the air, in Asia. The combined data from the planes will provide extraordinary detail to help scientists determine air pollutants and their origin, the researchers said.
It will be the last trip for the DC-8, which operates out of NASA’s Neil Armstrong research center in California. In a few years, a recently acquired Boeing 777 will take over as NASA’s largest airborne lab — it will be based at Langley.
NASA is committing about $20 million to the program this year, Crawford said. This study builds on data from two satellites launched in the past four years that provide hour-byhour air quality data.
The first, the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, or GEMS, launched in 2020 and is in geostationary orbit over South Korea. The second, Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, or TEMPO, launched last year and is in orbit over North America.
“When we think of air quality events, they typically unfold on the order of hours, not days,” Judd said.
Before the GEMS’ launch, satellites provided atmospheric information only once per day — usually sampled in the afternoon, which is not when emissions typically peak.
“Even experts in satellite remote sensing of air pollution, they’re still learning how to use these hourly observations,” Judd said. “It hasn’t been done before.”