What is it about?
Air pollution is increasingly understood to be a global issue, requiring an understanding of pollution sources, transport, and transformation from local to regional to global scales. GEMS will monitor air quality over Asia at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution from geostationary Earth orbit(GEO) for the first time, providing column measurements of aerosol, ozone and their precursors (nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde).
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Why is it important?
Half of the global population lives in Asia, and is exposed to high levels of air pollution. This fact has led to increased interest in regional Air Quality (AQ). Thus, systematic observations of ozone (O3), aerosols, and their precursors (nitrogen dioxide NO2, sulfur dioxide SO2, formaldehyde HCHO etc.) over wide areas, together with meteorological observations, are critical to public health and environmental policy in this region.
Perspectives
It was a great pleasure to write this article with 80+ co-authors with whom I have collaborated over long period. It happen to be published on a day after the launch of GEMS satellite from Guiana Kourou. I hope this article serves as a starting basis for the GEO air quality constellation to be established, with NASA's TEMPO and ESA's Sentinel 4 in the near future.
Jhoon Kim
Yonsei University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New Era of Air Quality Monitoring from Space: Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, January 2020, American Meteorological Society,
DOI: 10.1175/bams-d-18-0013.1.
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