STAQS

Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science
NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of POllution (TEMPO) mission is planned to launch in early 2023 to provide geostationary observations of air quality over North America. With this addition of high-resolution satellite measurements, the Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science (STAQS) mission seeks to integrate TEMPO satellite observations with traditional air quality monitoring to improve understanding of air quality science and increase societal benefit. STAQS will be conducted in summer 2023, targeting two primary domains in Los Angeles and New York City and several secondary domains across North America with ground and airborne based measurements.

The framework for STAQS stems from measurements strategies and collaborations developed during airborne air quality studies from the last decade. For STAQS, NASA is collaborating with partners conducting complementary air quality studies in 2023 (AEROMMA, CUPiDS, GOTHAAM) to build a synergistic observing system more robust than any singular entity could provide alone. This growing list of partners include federal agencies, regional air quality consortiums, state air quality agencies, and academic institutions.

The overall objective of STAQS is to improve our current understanding of air quality science under the TEMPO field of regard. Specific goals include, but are not limited to:

  •   » Evaluating TEMPO level 2 products geo-physically, spatially, and temporally
  •   » Interpreting the temporal and spatial evolution of air quality events tracked by TEMPO
  •   » Improving temporal estimates of anthropogenic, biogenic, and greenhouse gas emissions
  •   » Assessing the benefit of assimilating TEMPO data into chemical transport models
  •   » Linking air quality patterns to socio-demographic data
A Tale of Three Pollutants
Scott Collis of Argonne National Laboratory, left, and community leader Nedra Sims Fears work to advance urban resilience through science. They collaborated with NASA during the STAQS air quality mission in Chicago. NASA/Kathleen Gaeta

It was a hazy August day on Chicago’s South Side, and Nedra Sims Fears was hosting a small gathering to talk about the air. Interstate-94, which bisects her Chatham neighborhood, hummed nearby. “This was the summer I spent watching summer out my window,” Fears said. 

That’s because asthma runs in her family, and smoke from wildfires in Canada had wafted into Chicago, making it difficult for her to breathe. Many of her neighbors don’t have air conditioning, which means they don’t have the luxury of shutting their windows against the tiny hazardous particles contained in the smoke.

Several thousand feet above the Fears’ home, one of the largest flying laboratories in the world circled the skies over Chicago. The plane – NASA’s four-engine DC-8 jet – is a storied research craft. Over the past 25 years it has supported field campaigns across all seven continents. On this August 2023 day, it carried 40 researchers and a pack of scientific instruments investigating air pollution over the cities and pasturelands of the Midwest.

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NASA Shares First Images from US Pollution-Monitoring Instrument
NASA-led Mission to Map Air Pollution in 3D Over Megacities

NASA-led Mission to Map Air Pollution in 3D Over Megacities Describes the roles of STAQS, AEROMMA, TOLnet and Pandora for helping TEMPO understand the constituents of megacity pollution.

NASA-led Mission to Map Air Pollution in 3D Over Megacities