Satellite Data and Other NASA Resources for Air Quality Applications
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Carl Malings.
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High spatial and temporal resolution air quality estimation and forecasting can be enhanced by combining global data sources, like chemical transport models and satellite remote sensing, with local information from regulatory and low-cost air quality monitors. Successful integration of data from these diverse sources is complicated by many factors, however, including differences in spatial and temporal resolution, data availability and latency issues, varying data quality, and large computational and data storage requirements. This presentation will provide an overview of a NASA-funded effort to develop the foundation for future operationalization of air quality forecasting for world-wide end-users and integration into their air quality management decision processes, which will be achieved in future phases of this multi-year project. We will summarize our progress in developing a data fusion system using the Google Earth Engine platform which can integrate model, satellite, and surface-level monitoring datasets to enhance estimation and forecasting of air-quality-relevant pollutants at sub-daily and sub-city scales. The tool is being developed in close cooperation with several city- and regional-level air quality managers in the USA and around the world. Our end-goal is to provide these air quality managers with the information they need to assess and anticipate the impacts of poor air quality, track changes in air quality due to ongoing mitigation efforts and land use changes, and identify ways to improve their air quality monitoring strategies. This presentation will focus on recent advances achieved through the project, including integration of multiple air quality datasets in a prototype data fusion system in Google Earth Engine, the quantification of uncertainties associated with our data fusion approach, and the development of user interfaces and visualization tools to convey air quality information in a way which best meets end-user needs.
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Since 2019, the NASA Global Earth Observing System (GEOS) model has been used to generate global, near-real-time estimates and daily five-day forecasts of atmospheric composition at a horizontal resolution of 0.25 degrees (~25 km) from the surface up to the lower mesosphere. This composition forecast system (“GEOS-CF”) combines the GEOS weather forecasting model with the state-of-the-science GEOS-Chem chemistry module to deliver detailed analysis of a wide range of air pollutants, including the policy-relevant species such as ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Because GEOS-CF includes atmospheric levels up through the stratosphere, this system has been leveraged to support the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) satellite mission and provide stratospheric intrusion alerts to ground-based monitoring stations. We will present recent advances to GEOS-CF which target increased computational efficiency and accuracy. These include the incorporation of simplified chemistry mechanisms to accelerate model forecasts, use of model-observation data fusion techniques to provide highly localized forecasts, and assimilation of satellite observations to produce more accurate model analyses. We further discuss our attempts to make these tools publicly available on platforms outside the NASA domain, such as Google Earth Engine and Amazon Web Services with the goal to facilitate the integration of state-of-the-science air quality information onto platforms used by stakeholders, air quality managers, and the public.
Poor air quality is a major global public health concern, which is only projected to get worse in coming years. A comprehensive understanding of current and potential future air quality and its key drivers spanning from local to global scales is needed to tackle this important problem. This presentation will outline the sources of information that we use to understand air quality, including ground-based measurements, satellites, and models. After giving an overview of these data sources and outlining their strengths and limitations, we will take a look at how they can be used together to give us a better picture of air quality locally and globally with data fusion techniques.
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The goal of our project is to integrate diverse global and local air quality data sources using the cloud computing platform of Google Earth Engine to provide synthesized estimates and forecasts of air quality at a local scale but with a global scope freely accessible by air quality managers worldwide, facilitating their decision-making processes.
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Recent advances in low-cost air quality sensor systems are rapidly increasing the accessibility of air quality information around the world. At the same time, there are many technical challenges to appropriately and effectively using of the information they provide. A key opportunity to increase the applicability and actionability of low-cost sensor data is to use these devices at network scale and combine their information with insights from other air quality data sources such as numerical models and satellite remote sensing. When the limitations of low-cost sensors are understood and acknowledged, and appropriate complementary data are used to overcome these limitations, low cost sensors can support a variety of applications such as improving location-specific air quality forecasting and estimation, quantifying local source impacts, identifying air quality disparities, assessing the benefits of mitigation actions, and promoting community engagement with air quality issues. This presentation will first provide an overview and summarize key findings from a recently released World Meteorological Organization report discussing how networks of low-cost air quality sensor systems can be integrated to effectively support such applications. The presentation will also give a brief overview of an ongoing NASA-funded effort to create accessible tools for integrating multiple sources of air quality information, including global forecasting models, satellite remote sensing data, and in-situ information from both regulatory and low-cost monitors.
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