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NASA Satellites may Make Air Quality Forecasts Possible
December 15, 2007 at 12:18 PM
Environmental Health
Richard Engelen of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, United Kingdom, says that such a system may prove useful in efforts to improve air quality, assess the effectiveness of environmental regulations, and address the challenge of climate change.
"Regional modeling is already getting quite meaningful," he says.
Currently, air quality forecasts are possible up to a few days in advance in Europe, where there has been a concerted effort to combine atmospheric composition data from satellites and ground stations into the existing backbone of weather forecast computer models.
In the US, planning for the application of satellite data in regional air quality forecast model is underway at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
According to researchers, better observations are required for forecasts to become more accurate and global, and that is where NASA satellites are helping to fill in the gaps.
"To really do an accurate job of forecasting air quality, you have to know what pollution is coming in from upwind," says Kenneth Pickering of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who studies the chemistry and movement of gases through the atmosphere.
Pickering also revealed that satellite instruments were used in a recent study to look at air quality in Houston, Texas, a city with major air quality problems.
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