The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has conducted studies for nearly thirty years focused on analyzing the quality of the air we breathe, and more generally, about the ozone layer which envelops the Earth.
In recent years, NASA has collected and analyzed a lot of data to fully understand the mechanisms of climate change and air pollution, the problems in which the planet is currently facing. Let us take a look at the missions currently underway and discover how the Earth breathes.
Air pollution
Air pollution refers to chemicals or particles that are released into the atmosphere, and that may cause adverse effects on human health. Some of these air pollutants include nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and lead. The Clean Air Act of 1970 established legislation that is responsible for tracking these six air pollutants.
During this time of pandemic, humanity is indirectly perceiving the effects of its activity on the ecosystem. The benefits of cessation of human activity can be seen through river waters running to their original cycle, a blanket of smog disappearing from cities, and animals spotted in places once unthinkable.
Fortunately, Earth has many satellites that can capture what the human eye cannot see, which includes potentially harmful pollutants in the air. From space, these satellites help measure and track air pollution as it travels around the world. It is clear from the data gathered that reducing carbon emissions from human activities can have a profound effect on air quality.
AIRNow
The AirNow system is created to optimize the distribution of national reports and forecasts in real-time on air quality, which uses measurements made from thousands of monitoring stations in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. However, these ground monitoring stations do not reach anywhere but have limitations.
By introducing satellite aerosol optical depth observations from the MODIS instrument, it is possible to measure places that are not covered by AirNow, which allows obtaining a more precise and accurate image of how air pollution is distributed and how it changes over time.
NASA incorporated the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) data, and they were able to identify a significant drop in NO2 in the past 15 years in the United States. In fact, the air in the United States is the cleanest since the industrial revolution began.
Surface ozone is a toxic gas
While ozone in the stratosphere protects life on Earth, the surface ozone is a toxic gas for many plants and animals.
In a report by the Global Burden Disease, they emphasized that the leading environmental cause of mortality is the problem in air pollution. For example, the California fires have caused air quality problems for the past decade. A HAQAST team examined emissions and develop new methods for using existing data from VIIRS and MODIS tools, which helped California understand the extent of the fires and the quantification of emissions.
Different missions are already underway to investigate many facets that characterize this aspect of life on Earth. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) mission, for example, is designed to measure different pollutants in the United States during daylight hours.
TEMPO will give scientists the chance to observe how sources of pollution and chemical concentrations change in a single day. The TEMPO mission is scheduled to launch on 2022 in geostationary orbit at 35,786 km above Earth's equator. It will be part of an international constellation of similar satellites, including the South Korean geostationary environment monitoring spectrometer (GEMS) and the European Space Agency's Sentinel-4.
