Monitoring Air Quality
 
For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit
this small planet. We all breathe the same air.. (John F. Kennedy)
 
June 27, 2016:  Air quality is a global issue. Currents of air waft gaseous
and particulate pollutants from region to region, country to country, and even
continent to continent. Emissions from human activities, sunlight, weather,
pollution from far away, wildfires, and wind-blown dust can all affect air
quality. And it can change from day to day or even hour to hour. Addressing
this global issue requires a global effort. And that effort is in the works.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkY5oFQD2cc
 
The US, South Korea, and the European Union will each launch geostationary
satellite missions from 2018-2022 that will become part of a global air
quality monitoring system including other satellites, ground networks, air
quality models, and airborne sampling.  Geostationary satellites stay in place
over a single location on the Earth, allowing instruments onboard to collect
data continuously throughout the day to monitor the ever-changing state of the
air over that part of the globe.
 
In May 2016, NASA and the Korean National Institute for Environmental Research
began a precursor mission to prepare for this unprecedented global air quality
monitoring system. The Korea - United States Air Quality study (KORUS-AQ) is
assessing air quality across South Korea using observations from aircraft,
ground sites, ships, and satellites. KORUS-AQ is one of several field
experiments going on this year that will be monitoring the health of our
planet.
 
James Crawford of NASA's Langley Research Center says, "KORUS-AQ is helping
scientists understand the factors that affect air quality, how surface
emissions, atmospheric transport, and chemical transformations interact, and
how they're changing over time. KORUS-AQ prepares us to take advantage of the
upcoming global system by exercising all of the observational perspectives,
integrating the data, and using them to test our models of air quality."
 
The Korean peninsula is an excellent locale for studying air quality. The city
of Seoul is one of the globe's five most-populated metropolitan areas, and
local emissions from its vibrant transportation and industry present
challenges to air quality similar to those faced by megacities worldwide.
Korea's position downwind of China also highlights the issue of transported
versus local pollution; in addition to pollution from Chinese megacities,
plumes of dust from the Gobi desert can make their way to the Korean
peninsula. This complexity of accounting for local pollution and pollution
imported from elsewhere demonstrates the difficulty in devising strategies to
improve air quality.
 
Three aircraft are involved in these studies. NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory
carrying NASA and South Korean instruments is directly measuring the
composition of the atmosphere over the Korean peninsula at altitudes between
approximately 1,000 and 25,000 feet above the ground. A NASA King Air is
flying higher, with remote-sensing instruments that simulate satellite
observations. South Korea is flying its own King Air, which carries South
Korean and NASA sensors to directly measure the atmosphere in areas the
larger, less nimble DC-8 can't access. In addition, Korean scientists are
collecting data from their ground-based air quality monitoring network
consisting of more than 300 stations. They are also hosting NASA instruments
at some of the ground sites.
 
Together, the South Korean and US researchers are planning and coordinating
the flights. They are jointly providing air quality forecasting from an array
of model simulations. The KORUS-AQ data will provide an important test of
these models and their ability to accurately forecast air quality conditions.
 
"Improving the models is extremely important," explains Crawford. "Confidence
in our ability to simulate current air quality allows us to take the next step
and predict how air quality would respond to future emission scenarios.
Testing how various policies to regulate polluting emissions would improve air
quality enables responsible decision making."
 
People around the world will benefit from this team effort. Atmospheric
scientists using data from KORUS-AQ and the future constellations of
geostationary air quality satellites will work together to help make those
benefits a reality.
 
For everyone who breathes the air, more fresh science news may be found at
science.nasa.gov
 
 
Regards,
 
Roger

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 * Origin: NCS BBS - Houma, LoUiSiAna (1:3828/7)