Observing Storms from the International Space Station
A storm is pictured in the Arabian Sea less than 700 miles off the coast of Oman as the International Space Station orbited 260 miles above.
NASA / Jasmin Moghbeli
While the International Space Station orbited 260 miles above Earth on Oct. 20, 2023, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli snapped this image of a storm in the Arabian Sea, less than 700 miles off the coast of Oman. In addition to photographing our planet from the space station, NASA also observes Earth with satellites. These satellites collect data on storms that scientists can then use to create near real-time products to support disaster response.
For example, NASA and JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite frequently observes the structure of precipitation within tropical cyclones and hurricanes, and the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM product maps their intense rainfall rates over time to provide situational awareness for potential flood events. Following landfall, optical data collected by the Aqua, Terra, Landsat, or Suomi NPP satellites can map the extent and severity of flooding – and should clouds obscure the region, SAR data from ESA Sentinel satellites or NASA Airborne Science instruments can also be used to detect flooding. In addition to giving insights into how storms form and intensify, NASA satellites also supply key inputs to weather models to help generate life-saving forecasts.
Freight, smoke, and ozone impact the health of both Chicago residents and communities downwind. A NASA-led mission looks to help by mapping air pollutants at a neighborhood scale.
Credits: 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.
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
The fine particles, called PM2.5, are more than 35 times smaller than a grain of sand and can infiltrate deep into lung tissue. They degrade air quality in Chicago neighborhoods that are already disproportionately exposed to fossil fuel emissions. These include South and West Side neighborhoods located near highways, warehouses, and intermodal facilities, where freight-loaded trains and trucks converge. Thousands of such facilities are spread throughout Illinois, and they are hot spots of diesel exhaust and nitrogen oxides.
“Walking down the road, you see truck after truck after truck going into these facilities,” said Fears, who leads the Greater Chatham Initiative to revitalize a host of South Side neighborhoods. “Those neighborhoods live with day-to-day air pollution. It doesn’t take Canada being on fire for them to suffer.”
This was the summer I spent watching summer out my window.
Nedra Sims Fears
Chicago community leader
The result is that residents of Chicago and communities downwind are breathing harmful air pollutants including PM2.5, fossil fuel emissions, and smog. These pollutants move throughout the atmosphere and change by the hour, periodically exceeding the levels considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A version of this story plays out in every city in America. In New York and Los Angeles, tailpipe emissions spew from congested streets. In Phoenix, record-breaking heat stokes ozone formation. In port cities like Baltimore and Houston, emissions from ships, as well as oil refineries and chemical plants, contribute to dirty air.
While air quality monitors are distributed throughout the country, they are sparse in some regions, which means they cannot tell every neighborhood’s story. A NASA mission aims to change that with new tools to monitor air pollutants from the streets to the stratosphere.
STAQing Up Observations
NASA and NOAA, among other agencies, worked together this summer through the STAQS and AEROMMA missions to calibrate and validate NASA’s new TEMPO satellite. The satellite and missions combined aim to not only better measure air quality, and the major pollutants that impact it, but also to improve air quality, from street to stratosphere. This effort was documented during the August 2023 campaign leg, which took place over the Chicago region. Credit: NASA/Kathleen Gaeta
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.
From his seat over the wing, Barry Lefer watched the city’s iconic skyline rise from Lake Michigan.
“Air pollution has dramatically improved across the U.S. in the past few decades due to environmental regulations, but some communities are still hot spots of poor air quality,” said Lefer, head of the Tropospheric Composition Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The researchers onboard – from NASA, NOAA, and multiple universities – converged this summer on cities across North America. In coordinated research campaigns, they studied a range of air pollutants from industrial emissions to volatile chemical products used in cleaning agents and personal care items.
Crew member Matt Berry of NASA Armstrong smiles from the communications switchboard of NASA’s DC-8 airplane during a research flight over the Upper Midwest. Credit: NASA/Kathleen Gaeta
NASA’s part of the mission was called STAQS, short for Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science, and it focused on Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. STAQS included two Gulfstream jets equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and ground crews deployed in mobile research trailers across the country.
At the heart of the mission were two overarching questions: How do air pollutants change and move through the atmosphere, and which communities are disproportionately exposed?
A Vivid New Picture
2023 was a noteworthy summer for another reason: More than 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, a new NASA-funded instrument started scanning Earth. TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is the first space-based instrument designed to continuously measure daytime air quality over North America at the resolution of a few square miles. TEMPO launched in April, and NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory released its first data maps in August.
The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument measures sunlight reflected and scattered off the Earth’s surface, clouds and the atmosphere. Gases in the atmosphere absorb the sunlight, and the resulting spectra are then used to determine the amounts of several gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, including nitrogen dioxide. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Kel Elkins
TEMPO plus field campaigns like STAQS are giving scientists a more vivid picture of the air pollutants that contribute to disease and premature deaths in the U.S. These include nitrogen oxides, a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion commonly emitted by tailpipes and smokestacks; aerosols such as dust and soot particles; volatile organic compounds; and heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane and water vapor. As that new data is gathered and analyzed, air pollution scientists will have details down to a level that matters to people on the street.
The data will be freely accessible, Lefer said, and particularly useful to researchers, state agencies, and local policymakers working to develop solutions. “The hope is that the detailed new data we’re collecting will help communities make their air safer to breathe,” Lefer said.
Ground-level ozone, a main ingredient in smog, is a particularly compelling target for Lefer and the STAQS team. While ozone high in the atmosphere protects Earth from dangerous solar radiation, ground-level ozone aggravates respiratory diseases. It often spikes after rush hour, as nitrogen oxides react with chemicals called volatile organic compounds and sunlight. Each year, ground-level ozone and PM2.5 particles lead to more than 100,000 premature deaths and billions of dollars in annual damages in the U.S, according to the National Weather Service.
In the Chicago area, Lake Michigan’s powerful influence on local weather and winds cause ozone plumes to “travel on air currents, causing pollution levels to exceed EPA standards in rural communities hundreds of miles away,” Lefer said.
Chemicals emitted from cars, trucks and factories react with sunlight and heat to form ozone, a key ingredient of smog. Plumes of ozone then get pushed by lake breezes into rural communities. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab
Plume Over the Prairie
A short drive up Interstate-94 from Chicago, ozone was on the mind of Todd McKinney, who was scrambling in the dark. A raging Lake Michigan storm had knocked out power in his research trailer nestled in a Wisconsin prairie blooming with wildflowers just across the state line from Illinois. McKinney, a graduate student from the University of Alabama-Huntsville, was trying to get the lights back on before members of a Wisconsin environmental agency arrived for a tour.
For much of the summer, he has been living and working in the trailer, which is one part camper van, two parts high-tech laboratory. Its centerpiece is a custom-built lidar for measuring ozone in different layers of the lower atmosphere, also known as the troposphere. The mobile facility is part of NASA’s Tropospheric Ozone Lidar Network (TOLNet), a high-powered array of lasers used to identify and locate air pollutants.
Is the ozone that we’re seeing coming from an industrial source or the whole city? Is it caused by people idling in their cars at rush hour? We don’t know yet, but we’re working to track it back.
Todd McKinney
University of Alabama, Huntsville Graduate Student
The instruments were originally designed to be stationary. But McKinney said that the development of TEMPO was an inspiration for many researchers, who wanted to get out into the field and contribute real-time data to the summer’s air quality campaign. The trailer he’s working from has been in the making for 10 years – ever since the first announcement of TEMPO. Such ground-based measurements — which also include hourly drone flights and a continual stream of high-altitude weather balloons — help crosscheck the early data coming down from TEMPO in space.
Located downwind from Chicago, shoreline areas like Chiwaukee Prairie are occasionally dosed with ozone that has blown in from the city, he said. But the source is often difficult to pinpoint.
“Is the ozone that we’re seeing coming from an industrial source or the whole city?” he said. “Is it caused by people idling in their cars at rush hour? We don’t know yet, but we’re working to track it back.”
And tracking it back is the first step to developing a solution.
Empowering communities
Using advanced computer modeling to map air pollution hotspots across Chicago, a research team from Northwestern University found that neighborhoods alongside Lake Michigan experience more ground-level ozone pollution than the rest of the city. The researchers also found that neighborhoods located near highways like I-94 experience twice the concentration of nitrogen dioxide and dust than communities with the best air quality in the city.
The growth of online shopping and same-day delivery warehouses comes at a cost to air quality, with nearby homes taking on the burden of pollution. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab
“Empowering communities with data is an environmental justice issue,” said Daniel Horton, assistant professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern, who leads this research. He hopes that NASA measurements will inform clean-air solutions, such as the electrification of heavy-duty trucks and buses, and more green space in urban neighborhoods.
Air pollution is not an intractable problem, emphasized Zac Adelman, whose regional consortium works with state agencies in the Upper Midwest to improve air quality. The solution lies in devoting resources where they’ll be most effective.
“The question is, what do we control?” said Adelman, executive director of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium. “What are the sources that we need to be concerned about, and what’s actionable information that we can bring to the state regulators and to the federal government, too?”
Empowering communities with data is an environmental justice issue.
Daniel Horton
Northwestern University professor and researcher
“The STAQS campaign and associated monitoring activities that are growing up around it are giving us an opportunity to try to answer those questions,” he added. “That’s a pretty empowering concept, right?”
Sacred Space Requires Clean Air
Back in her living room, Nedra Fears and atmospheric scientist Scott Collis of Argonne National Laboratory discussed how more trees, open spaces, and green rooftops might improve air quality in hard-hit neighborhoods. It’s part of a project they’re collaborating on called CROCUS, short for Community Research on Climate and Urban Science.
Combining scientific research and community guidance, the CROCUS team studies climate challenges in urban Chicago. Community input is critical, Collis said, to identify questions and topics – from localized flooding to heat waves – and ensure that research results directly benefit local residents. The team contributed to the summer’s air quality campaign using a network of sensors deployed throughout the region. CROCUS is funded by the Department of Energy.
Air quality is a complicated issue, but for Fears, the goal is simple. She wants to go on morning walks with her husband. She wants her neighbors’ concerns to be heard. Mostly, she wants to breathe clean air in her own living room, not shut the windows against the pollution she can often feel at the back of her throat.
“You don’t want that pollution in your house,” she said. “Your house is your sacred space where you can be joyful and well.”
Story by Sally Younger. Video and stills by Kathleen Gaeta.
Goddard Engineers Improve NASA Lidar Tech for Exploration
Like a sonar using light instead of sound, lidar technology increasingly helps NASA scientists and explorers with remote sensing and surveying, mapping, 3D-image scanning, hazard detection and avoidance, and navigation.
Cutting edge innovations by NASA researchers seek to refine lidars into smaller, lighter, more versatile tools for exploration.
“There are a lot of flavors of lidar right now,” said Cheryl Gramling, assistant chief for technology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s such an important technology because of the precision and versatility that it offers.”
Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a remote sensing technology related to sonar and radar. Lidar uses pulses of light to measure distances and properties of objects accurately, by measuring the time it takes the light to reflect back to the lidar sensor.
Goddard innovators are looking to expand the usefulness of lidar applications in communication and navigation, planetary exploration, and space operations. Here are a few of the current investigations.
Foldable, Flat Lidar Optics
A prototype origami-pattern deployment sequence is demonstrated by graduate students Brandon Sargent (left) and Carolina Wright (right) of Brigham Young University. It shows the large expansion capability and the flexibility in the overall architecture.
Brigham Young University / Larry L. Howell
Research engineer Mark Stephen is developing a deployable, segmented telescope to capture the returning light signal using state-of-the-art flat-panel optics organized in foldable, origami-inspired panels. Working with researchers at Brigham Young University, their team seeks to provide future missions with the benefits of lidar technology without the current technologies’ high cost and limited efficiency.
Lidar typically is a high-cost technology that may not make the cut for tomorrow’s smaller, lighter, and more efficient missions. Size, weight, and power demands limit the technology’s ability to be implemented in more missions.
“Most people want really high performance,” Stephen said, “But they want it in a small, light, and power-efficient package. We’re trying to find the best balance, and cost matters. Often the cost comes more from the size, weight, and power than it does from the actual development if we’re launching something into space. That is where it gets expensive.”
Stephen is wrapping up a three-year effort to improve lidars through a Radical Innovation Initiative grant within Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program. Their project has been picked up by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office to fund further improvements.
Typically, lidar receivers depend on bulky lenses to capture light, each lens needs a specific curvature and size to bend the light, in addition to the structures which hold the lenses, and other mechanics, Stephen said. Larger lenses are more effective, and that is where lidar technology tends to get heavy.
Flat optics use new types of nano-structured materials to manipulate individual photons, he said. These meta-materials allow thin and lightweight optics to perform the same functions as much larger and more expensive three-dimensional counterparts.
Silica wafers covered with structures smaller than the wavelengths of incoming light, these “meta-atomic” structures allow the lightweight, flat panel to perform the functions of lenses and mirrors without their bulk.
Nano Letters / L. Zhang, S. Chang, X. Chen, Y. Ding, T. Rahman, Y. Duan, M. Stephen, and X. Ni
“We are working toward being able to have a family of instruments where we have some flexibility and agility to meet the needs of a given mission,” Stephen said. “We want to develop a tool where you can make a better trade in terms of size, weight and power versus performance.”
One Laser, Many Wavelengths
Goddard engineer Guangning Yang is looking to improve lidar by producing multiple wavelengths of light from a single beam. Most modern lidars use multiple beams of a single wavelength to increase their accuracy.
Yang is the primary investigator for CASALS, or Concurrent Artificially intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System, a lidar technology that can sweep a large area more efficiently.
CASALS starts with one laser pulse, but instead of splitting that pulse into the many directions it needs to travel, their technology changes the wavelength of the laser at a very high speed. The different wavelengths of light then exit the laser transmitter at different angles based on their wavelength.
This pulse sequence produces a broom-like array sweeping across the object, landscape, or celestial body being studied.
“We have improved the efficiency,” Yang said, “and that will allow us to reduce the instrument’s size dramatically.”
Along with improvements in efficiency, CASALS is smaller than a typical lidar instrument. Yang said CASALS could help provide higher-density mapping of Earth and of other planets and moons as well as assisting with autonomous descents and landings.
Both flat optics and wavelength scanning offer new possibilities for lidar technology and are part of an array of investigations expected to unlock new opportunities in science and navigating distant worlds, Gramling said.
By Elizabeth Markham
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
New Software Enables Atmospheric Modeling with Greater Resolution
3 Min Read
New Software Enables Atmospheric Modeling with Greater Resolution
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Credits: Randall Martin / Washington University
PROJECT
High Performance GEOS-Chem
SNAPSHOT
An ESTO investment in software optimization helps researchers and citizen scientists model air quality and greenhouse gases with greater resolution, allowing them to better understand how global atmospheric trends impact local areas.
A data visualization describing atmospheric NO2 concentrations, produced using High Performance GEOS-Chem
Image credit: Randall Martin / Washington University
Next-generation software is making it easier for researchers, policy makers, and citizen scientists to model air quality and greenhouse gases using NASA meteorological data.
This novel software, “High Performance GEOS-Chem,” uses equations representing the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and boundary conditions from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observation System (GEOS) to represent global atmospheric chemistry across three dimensions at a horizontal spatial resolution of 12 kilometers by 12 kilometers per pixel—an area about one-fifth the size of New York City.
For comparison, the original GEOS-Chem model that was developed in 2001 only produced global simulations at a spatial resolution of about 200 by 250 square kilometers – an area about twice as large as the entire state of New Jersey.
With this improved resolution, researchers interested in air quality and atmospheric chemistry in specific communities can use models, simulations, and visualizations built with NASA data to better understand how global atmospheric trends impact local areas.
GEOS-Chem is an open-source model freely accessible here. More information about High Performance Geos-Chem – including manuals and tutorials – can be found here.
“This new generation of High Performance GEOS-Chem offers major advancements for ease of use, computational performance, versatility, resolution, and accuracy,” said Randall Martin, a professor at Washington University’s McKelvey School of Engineering and Primary Investigator for the High Performance GEOS-Chem project.
In a recent technical demonstration of their improved GEOS-Chem software, Martin and his team showed two images mapping tropospheric nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant typically produced by burning fossil fuels.
The image produced with High Performance GEOS-Chem featured 200 million more grid cells than the image produced with the original GEOS-Chem software. In other words, High Performance GEOS-Chem creates images more resolute by a factor of about 200.
“We’re really excited. Many features can be examined that aren’t resolved at all at the coarser resolution,” said Martin.
For researchers interested in global air quality and atmospheric composition with local resolution, this new generation of the High Performance GEOS-Chem marks the beginning of a new era for creating descriptive models.
Two visualizations using the same data generated by High Performance GEOS-Chem (top) and the original GEOS-Chem software (bottom). High Performance GEOS-Chem created an image more resolute than the original GEOS-Chem software by a factor of 200.
(Image credit: Randall Martin / Washington University)
Martin and his team added a number of technological innovations to High Performance GEOS-Chem. In particular, they incorporated a cubed-sphere computation grid into their GEOS-Chem software, reducing noise at the poles and allowing for higher resolution.
High Performance GEOS-Chem also includes a cloud computing capability. This spreads the resource-intensive computation work of generating detailed atmospheric models across dispersed computing nodes, such as Amazon Web Services.
Martin and his team pride themselves on ensuring GEOS-Chem remains an open and accessible tool for anyone interested in simulating atmospheric composition. Their website includes a full suite of tutorial videos,manuals, and guides for using GEOS-Chem effectively.
“NASA enabled us to develop this new generation of GEOS-Chem that has both the additional technical performance and offers the ease of use that this large community requires,” said Martin.
Future iterations of GEOS-Chem could feature further improvements. Developing a better user interface and increasing the modularity of GEOS-Chem are just a few objectives Martin and his team have in mind.
NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST), a part of NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), funded this program.
PROJECT LEAD
Randall Martin, Washington University in St. Louis
SPONSORING ORGANIZATION
Earth Science Division’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program
Maricela Lizcano never dreamed of working for NASA.
In fact, she wasn’t planning on furthering her education until she had a revelation in her late twenties.
“I was watching one of those forensic shows, and I loved the way they caught the criminals with science,” said Lizcano, research materials engineer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “I wanted to be able to do that. I realized I should be studying science and engineering.”
It took Lizcano about ten years to prepare mentally and financially to go back to school, and during that time, she received some startling news.
“I found out that I was losing my sight, and it was very scary,” Lizcano said. “I think that was one of the things that tossed me off the rails. I had so many questions: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to work or go to school? How quickly am I losing my vision?’ There were no answers.”
Lizcano was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a rare genetic eye disease that occurs when fatty material builds up on the macula — the small part of the retina needed for sharp, central vision.
“My Stargardt disease started on the outer edges of my macula, and over time, it grew to the center,” Lizcano said. “By the time I was 45 years old, it had pretty much taken all of my central vision, and now I rely on my peripheral vision to see.”
Eventually, Lizcano viewed this as another obstacle to hurdle, no different from any others she had experienced in her life. She attended the University of Texas–Pan American, now called the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She started during a second summer session, easing her way to full-time attendance while also holding a job.
Because of her new disability, she couldn’t see what professors were writing on the board. She taught herself to listen intently to the topics being discussed in the lecture, then after class, she read the textbook and rewrote the lecture notes using special magnification tools.
“It took that much longer, but you learn to adapt,” Lizcano said. “There are certain skills you develop because of the changes you have to make when you have a disability. I learned that I really have to listen.”
After five years, Lizcano completed her mechanical engineering degree. She didn’t get a job right away after graduation, so she continued her education and earned master’s and doctorate degrees.
“I can’t just look at my disability as some great thing that I really had to overcome,” Lizcano said. “I think a lot of people overcome many obstacles because we are driven by the desire to achieve things. You don’t see the challenges as challenges, you just see them as something to conquer to get to your goal.”
In 2010, former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to increase federal employment of individuals with disabilities. The executive order directed executive departments and agencies to improve their efforts to employ workers with disabilities through increased recruitment, hiring, and retention of these individuals.
“Through the Workforce Recruitment Program, I had the opportunity to interview with representatives from federal agencies,” Lizcano said. “I heard nothing for a long time, but then suddenly I got an email from NASA Glenn asking if I’d present my research.”
She accepted a job as a research materials engineer and now leads a team working on high-voltage materials for electrified aircraft. She collaborates with various universities to develop composite insulation materials and lightweight conductors.
Even now working at NASA, Lizcano faces challenges that she finds ways to overcome. She depends on her fellow colleagues to carpool to work and accessibility tools — like the magnifier app — to use her computer.
“Understanding my needs allowed me to get over the fact that I lost my independence,” Lizcano said. “It was a mind shift to be all right with asking for help.”
Lizcano’s recommends a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career to anyone looking for a challenge or excitement.
“We’re always solving problems. If you’re one of those people who really wants to make a difference in the world, STEM careers are a good place to start,” Lizcano said. “Any challenge that you may have in result of a disability is no different than the challenge you’re trying to solve, and it will give you the motivation and unique skills you need to be successful.”
NASA is in a Golden Era of aeronautics and space exploration. In partnership with commercial and private businesses, NASA is currently making history with significant missions such as Artemis, Quesst, and electrified aviation. The NASA’s Modern History Makers series highlights members of NASA Glenn’s workforce who make these remarkable missions possible.
