WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - NASA has released new high-resolutions data on air quality in the atmosphere covering North America.
NASA said it has made new data available that can provide air pollution observations at unprecedented resolutions - down to the scale of individual neighborhoods.
The near real-time data comes from the U.S. space agency's TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument, which launched last year to improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space.
'TEMPO is one of NASA's Earth observing instruments making giant leaps to improve life on our home planet,' said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
The TEMPO mission gathers hourly daytime scans of the atmosphere over North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Coast, and from Mexico City to central Canada. The instrument detects pollution by observing how sunlight is absorbed and scattered by gases and particles in the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere.
'All the pollutants that TEMPO is measuring cause health issues,' said Hazem Mahmoud, science lead at NASA Langley's Atmospheric Science Data Center. 'We have more than 500 early adopters using these datasets right away. We expect to see epidemiologists and health experts using this data in the near future. Researchers studying the respiratory system and the impact of these pollutants on people's health will find TEMPO's measurements invaluable.'
'Data gathered by TEMPO will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution,' said Xiong Liu, senior physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and principal investigator for the mission. Researchers will be able to conduct studies of rush hour pollution, linkages of diseases and health issues to acute exposure of air pollution, how air pollution disproportionately impacts underserved communities, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, and the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes.
Measurements by TEMPO include air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone.
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