NASA Funding for TEMPO Pollution Monitoring Project

• •NASA awarded $31.19 million to the Smithsonian Institution for the TEMPO project.
• •TEMPO measures air pollution across North America hourly at sub-urban spatial resolution.
• •The instrument operates from a geostationary orbit to capture the diurnal cycle of emissions.
• •TEMPO tracks O3, NO2, SO2, H2CO, C2H2O2, H2O, aerosols, cloud parameters, and UVB radiation.
• •The project aims to reduce uncertainty in air quality predictions by 50%.
• •Data collected by TEMPO will be made widely and publicly available in near-real-time.
• •The project was selected under the NASA SALMON-2 Announcement of Opportunity.
• •TEMPO is part of the Earth Venture Instrument-1 (EVI-1) element of the Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) program.
• •The project builds on the heritage of five previous spectrometers flown in low-earth-orbit.
• •TEMPO fulfills atmospheric measurement capabilities recommended in the 2007 National Research Council Decadal Survey.
• •TEMPO will function as part of a global constellation alongside Europe's Sentinel 4 and Asia's GEMS.

This project provides public access to real-time air quality data and improves the accuracy of air quality predictions by 50%, which informs regional emission-control strategies.

Patterns POLISCOPE noticed across the record. These are observations to investigate, not conclusions.