Helping Our Personnel Breathe Easier: Partnering With NASA to Expand Reliable Air Quality Data

A Department of State team comprised of representatives from policy, management, medical, and regional bureaus visited the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on June 1^st to meet with NASA scientists about our ongoing collaboration to provide U.S. diplomatic posts with air quality data.  Poor air quality around the world continues to be a risk to U.S. government personnel, not to mention the significant impacts on the local population, and combatting it requires reliable, accurate data. Many locations around the world simply do not have real-time, reliable data.

NASA and the State Department are working to fill in the data gaps. The NASA-State Department collaboration has been ongoing for many years through various informal interactions.  The NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Science Team (HAQAST) selected a proposal by a team of NASA and State Department scientists.  In 2020, the Department approached NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG) with a request for temporally and spatially resolved air quality data for each of the Department’s overseas posts.  Dr. John Kerekes, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a former Jefferson Science Fellow in the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions (M/SS) Greening Diplomacy Initiative (GDI), was one of authors of this proposal.  While ground-based reference monitors are the gold standard for air quality data, they can be expensive to install and maintain.  “There are posts where no monitor exists, and even for the posts that do have them, staff and families spend much of their time at homes or schools, which can be far away,” said Dr. Kerekes.  Noting that air quality can vary dramatically over small distances, he noted that “Satellites offer the opportunity to collect data over a wider area.” 

GDI’s proposal was one of the few selected by the SNWG and has since developed into a successful ongoing collaboration between the two agencies.  Dr. Pawan Gupta and Dr. Christoph A. Keller, NASA research scientists, have been developing a city-scale air quality model that, combined with satellite and other available data, will provide air quality forecasts to each post.  These forecasts will be incorporated into the Department’s ZephAir air quality app that already provides accurate, real-time air quality data from regulatory-grade air quality monitors at 80 posts.

GDI is also working with NASA to install additional NASA sensors (as a part of the NASA PANDORA project led by Dr. Thomas Hanisco from NASA Goddard) at several posts to measure additional types of air pollutants to help calibrate satellite data.  Installing these ground-based monitors at select posts will support improved understanding of air quality in conjunction with data from the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) satellite, set to launch in 2024. NASA’s MAIA satellite project will study how different types of particulate matter air pollution affect human health and improve satellite modeling of air quality, which is key to filling in data gaps worldwide.

The Department is fortunate to utilize U.S. air quality experts through multiple programs to not only obtain that data, but to analyze and propose strategies to decrease pollutant concentrations and minimize exposure risk.  These programs are instrumental in protecting the health and safety of U.S. government personnel and advancing environmental diplomacy worldwide.

About the Author: Calvin Arter is an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the Greening Diplomacy Initiative, Office of Management Strategy and Solutions