Air

Air

Pages

SLAP Blog

SLAP/LIAISE Paper Published

01 December 2023

"High-Resolution Soil Moisture—a European Airborne Campaign Using NASA Goddard’s Scanning L-Band Active Passive (SLAP)," which describes the results from SLAP collected during the Land surface Interactions with the Atmosphere over the Iberian Semi-arid Environment (LIAISE) field campaign, has been published in the journal of Remote Sensing in Earth Systems Sciences.

DOI: 10.1007/s41976-023-00099-4

SLAPex Freeze/Thaw

SLAPex Freeze/Thaw, Canada 2015

In Fall of 2015, the SLAP instrument was deployed to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to collect data for freeze/thaw algorithm evaluation. Thirteen science flights were flown over a target area southwest of Winnipeg, MB, coincident with the study area used in SMAPVEX12.

EcoSar Links

Airborne Sensors:

Field Campaigns

FarmFlux

FarmFlux is an airborne mission to study how gas and particle emissions from U.S. agriculture affect air quality, climate, and ecosystems. The investigation will focus on two key agricultural sectors: crops and animals. FarmFlux is supported by the NASA Earth Venture Suborbital program.

whymsie

Westcoast & Heartland Hyperspectral Microwave Sensor Intensive Experiment

The 2017 Decadal Survey, and subsequent PBL study team and NASA Decadal Survey Incubation (DSI) program prioritize the need for improved PBL observations for Earth Science and societal benefit and recommend a decadal path of ‘PBL incubation’ towards a future spaceborne mission.

GPM

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is an international network of satellites that provide the next-generation global observations of rain and snow.

Space Missions

cloud

PolSIR

The PolSIR instrument – short for Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer – will help humanity better understand Earth’s dynamic atmosphere and its impact on climate by studying ice clouds that form at high altitudes throughout tropical and sub-tropical regions. Specifically, identical pairs of the radiometers (325 and 680 GHz) will fly aboard two CubeSats (small satellites like a portable electric oven) to provide crucial information about how ice clouds act in Earth climate system.

NISAR

Using advanced radar imaging that will provide an unprecedented, detailed view of Earth, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, satellite is designed to observe and take measurements of some of the planet's most complex processes, including ecosystem disturbances, ice-sheet collapse, and natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides.

Website:

aura

Aura

Aura (Latin for breeze) was launched July 15, 2004. Aura is part of the Earth Science Projects Division, a program dedicated to monitoring the complex interactions that affect the globe using NASA satellites and data systems. Aura's four instruments study the atmosphere's chemistry and dynamics. The satellite's measurements will enable scientists to investigate questions about ozone trends, air quality changes, and their linkage to climate change.

Website:

https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov

Research Areas

Visualization Programs

Sophisticated display technology is required to analyze and understand the massive quantities of meteorological data being produced by satellite and other data collection systems, and from simulations from 3-dimensional models. As part of NASA's public out reach activities, the availability of such data sets via the Internet and World Wide Web is being expanded. This section describes the role of staff in this regard.

Atmospheric Profiling

The circulation of the atmosphere is affected by the horizontal, vertical, and temporal distribution of atmospheric constituents such as water vapor, aerosols, clouds, precipitation, and latent heat released by cloud formation. Improving our ability to predict weather and climate depends upon accurate representation of these constituents in the vertical dimension. However, the depth and turbulence of the atmosphere make observing gases and microscopic particles in the vertical dimension, i.e., profiling, particularly challenging.

Precipitation and Fluxes

Advances in our understanding of global hydrological processes will require detailed precipitation estimates on a broad range of time and space scales. Satellite observations provide a critical contribution toward mapping global rainfall and its variability. Over long time periods, monthly records of precipitation will prove valuable in determining global and regional precipitation trends and possibly separating anthropogenic changes from the large natural variations in rainfall.

Outreach

icecube

IceCube

IceCube is a 3U CubeSat funded by NASA for spaceflight demonstration of a commercial 883-GHz cloud radiometer. See this book chapter.

IRC-IAMAS

IRC-IAMAS

The role of the International Radiation Commission is to promote research into atmospheric radiation as well as application of that research to practical problems. Dr. Lazaros Oreopooulos and Alexander Marshak are members of the International Radiation Commission.

Website:

Earth Observatory

Explore the causes and effects of climatic and environmental change through the use of real satellite data.

Website:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Data Files

Dark Target

The Dark-Target (DT) satellite aerosol product delivers comprehensive aerosol loading data over land and ocean, along with aerosol property over ocean and diagnostic information. Available on various sensors onboarding both low earth orbit and geostationary satellites, DT aerosol products have been used to develop global and regional aerosol climatology, to study the interaction of aerosols with clouds and ocean ecosystems, and for air quality assessments and forecasts. Click here to see the Dark Target website

deep blue

Deep Blue

Deep Blue uses measurements made by satellite instruments orbiting the Earth to determine the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, and the properties of those aerosols. 'Aerosols' is a catch-all term covering particles suspended in the atmosphere, including but not limited to desert dust, smoke, volcanic ash, industrial smog, and sea spray.

THOR Data

THOR data is usually visualized in two ways. The two examples below are from the March 2002 THOR Validation Campaign that took place over Oklahoma.

Instruments

cloud

PolSIR

The PolSIR instrument – short for Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer – will help humanity better understand Earth’s dynamic atmosphere and its impact on climate by studying ice clouds that form at high altitudes throughout tropical and sub-tropical regions.

Organizations:

SMOS

To go from one to the other it is a very straightforward rotation… But a bit tricky though. As we have developed several such tools for our own purposes we though that to avoid duplication of efforts (and reduce aspirin consumption) many might appreciate having a ready made tool!

Organizations:

Pandora

Pandora

Pandora spectrometer instrument spectroscopy is used to measure columnar amounts of trace gases in the atmosphere. These gases (O3, NO2, CH2O) absorb specific wavelengths of light from the sun in the ultraviolet-visible spectrum.

Organizations:

Models

GEOSCCM

GEOSCCM

The Goddard chemistry climate model, GEOSCCM, is based on the NASA/GMAO general circulation model integrated with various chemical packages. We have completed a series of experiments with the coupled model designed to understand potential feedbacks between the atmosphere's composition and the state of the climate.

NU-WRF

NU-WRF

The NASA-Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) model is an observation-driven regional earth system modeling and assimilation system at satellite-resolvable scale.

i3rc

I3RC

About I3RC

The I3RC project was initiated by Robert Cahalan in the mid 1990s, with funding from the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program and the NASA Radiation Sciences Program, and with endorsements from International Radiation Commission and GEWEX Radiation Panel. Its goals include: