In the early morning hours of Friday, April 7th, NASA successfully launched the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (EVI-1) (TEMPO) satellite mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. TEMPO will provide high resolution air quality data on an hourly basis across North America. NOAA representatives attending the launch included Ivanka Stajner (NWS), Shobha Kondragunta (NESDIS), Walter Wolf (NESDIS), and Greg Frost (OAR).
NOAA will play an important role in using and evaluating the data from TEMPO, as well as coordinating successive scientific activities. TEMPO will provide key information to inform the atmospheric composition observing capabilities of NOAA’s atmospheric composition instrument (ACX), which is planned to launch with the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) mission. The GeoXO constellation is the next generation of NOAA’s geostationary satellites and a follow on to the current GOES-R program. GeoXO spacecraft will begin launching and operating in the early 2030’s and will support forecasts and warnings of extreme weather and environmental hazards. The ACX instrument will produce data to improve air quality monitoring and forecasting as well as mitigate health impacts from severe pollution and smoke events. NOAA’s Atmospheric Composition From Space (NACS) Team, that includes CPO’s Greg Frost, Monika Kopacz, Victoria Breeze and Shiv Das, is engaged in strategic planning for NOAA space capabilities, including GeoXO, and hosts a directory for information relevant to these activities.
Watch the TEMPO launch (launch sequence begins ~23 minutes)
