We have a number of residents, particularly residents living
near warehouse environments that experience poor air quality on a
daily basis. And when
you have a health condition or are sensitive, you don't want
that kind of pollution in your house.
The best solutions are data driven. When people are given
the right data, they will make the right decisions for my
community, and communities across Chicago and the region.
So NASA has this new initiative, and it's called Earth science to
action. And part of what we're doing is we want to understand
the sources of air pollution and how it gets transported in the
atmosphere. And these stakeholders are able to make
the air safer to breathe. Ground level ozone, it physically burns
your lungs. NO2 is a toxic gas. It is linked with pediatric
asthma. PM2.5-- the small particles you breathe in,
they're small enough that they can go through your lungs into
your bloodstream. TEMPO stands for Tropospheric Emissions
Monitoring of Pollution, it will measure air pollution over North
America, every daylight hour, this is really going to be a
game changer helping us understand pollution at the
neighborhood scale.
Today's a really exciting day for both NASA and NOAA. Today,
the TEMPO satellite started its first scans of North America.
We've got three aircraft in the air flying over Chicago, got
dozens of instruments on the DC-8, getting the in situ levels
of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. And then flying above us
right now is the P3 in the G5 with remote sensing payload
decks. It's a very exciting day, historic day. We've been waiting
over a decade, for the TEMPO instrument to start collecting
data.
You know, you build a satellite, it takes years to build it and
you test it in the lab, but you never know if it's going to
work. When you ship it across the country, you put it on a
rocket, you launch it into space. And so yesterday we found
out that TEMPO really is going to be able to measure air
quality over North America. One of the exciting things about
this AEROMMA STAQS field campaign is going to help us
calibrate and validate the TEMPO satellite. So while we're
flying, both the remote sensing and the sensors that are
measuring what's in the atmosphere down low, TEMPO is
scanning overhead. And so we're going to use that data to help
improve the precision and accuracy of the TEMPO satellite.
We're on an airbase Wright Patterson Air Base in Dayton,
Ohio. There's jets taking off and transports taking off and we
have hundreds of people here. We want to understand the sources
of air pollution and how it gets transported in the atmosphere.
And what's wonderful is we'll work with our partners at EPA
and NOAA to help make sure that NASA and these stakeholders are
able to make the air safer to breathe.
If there's one takeaway from this mission, what we want to
learn is how can satellites help us address air quality issues.
We have this new asset into space with TEMPO, and it will be
operating over the next few years. So this is a pathfinder
for us to integrate these types of measurements into air quality
decision making. So there's a lot of people that are doing
research in the community. And as we partner up and put our
assets together, we can actually do something bigger than any
individual component could do alone.
Right now in the United States, EPA has air pollution monitors
in certain neighborhoods around the US but we don't know the air
pollution in every neighborhood. The TEMPO satellite is going to
get every hour during the daytime. We'll see how pollution
changes from the morning to the afternoon to the evening we'll
see pollution get transported from one neighborhood to another
and we'll be able to see where we don't currently have monitors
so we'll get a good picture of environmental inequalities.
Factories, industrial centers, intermodal facilities, transport
hubs, warehouses— all of these facilities have higher emissions
than other locations in the city. Certain communities don't
have the ability to influence decisions on where these
facilities are located. Because of that many of these facilities
are located in disadvantaged communities and which is an
environmental justice issue in the city. One of the interesting
things about Chicago is that we're rapidly advancing our
ability to characterize air quality in the city. And one of
the things we're learning is that the observations that we
have don't necessarily agree with the lived experience of
some of the residents in the city.
My family members, we all have asthma. And so air quality is
really important because we live in a hot climate and that you
want to open up your windows. But you know, if you open up
your windows, not only are you going to get wind, but you're
going to get polluted wind. And when you have a health condition
or are sensitive, you don't want that kind of pollution in your
house. Your house is your sacred space that where you can be
joyful and well in.
Chicago happens to be the the largest freight hub in North
America, which means we have a whole bunch of heavy duty
vehicles coming through a number of warehouses, and as they sit
and idle, they'll be polluting in their environments. And if
you happen to be a resident in a warehouse environment, you're
going to be exposed to that much more pollution.
We have adjacent communities, they have much higher street
traffic from trucks, and the pollution there is off the hooks
and you just walking down the street, you see truck after
truck after truck. And so those are in underserved
neighborhoods, they have to live with a high level of day to day
pollution, it doesn't take Canada being on fire for them to
Air quality in Chicago is a complex news story, because it
suffer.
doesn't affect everybody equally. For one thing, there
are two major things that lead to bad air quality in Chicago,
you've got locally generated emissions, the interaction with
sunshine, which leads to ozone and particulate matter. But as
we've seen, especially this year, you have non locally
driven air quality issues such as that that comes from the
Canadian wildfires. So TEMPO is an amazing instrument. When we
talk about both climate models that DOE runs and spaceborn
missions that NASA runs. It's like your digital camera. It's
getting higher and higher in resolution. That's why we are
partnering with the AEROMMA and STAQS missions over Chicago,
we're really creating actionable data that will really make a
difference in people's lives.
I am really impressed with how much big data has allowed us to
really drill down and really understand our community. When
you go and ask for policy and fiscal support to have the
science with it. So it's not just what we think. But it's
what we know.
We have TEMPO working we know it's working. We have AEROMMA
and STAQS datasets that are going to help us calibrate it.
And in October, the data is going to be flowing into the
NASA atmospheric science data center. And so that will be
publicly available to anyone in particular, we know that our
partners at the EPA and NOAA are excited to use this data to
understand air pollution in the United States but also be able
to use it to improve the air quality forecast.