I am currently running the HSRL-2 instrument onboard the G
III during the Asia AQ field campaign.
We are here in Asia to study air quality and air pollution. There
are a lot of major cities in Asia, there's a lot of people
living in Asia, and there's a lot of factors that can control
whether the air quality is good or bad. And so we're here to try
to understand what those factors are and how we can make the air
quality even better.
It's been said that bad air quality anywhere is bad air
quality everywhere. The air doesn't care if there's a
country border or a state border, it does whatever it
wants, and it moves however it wants dictated by weather and by
meteorology. And I think that's what makes Asia AQ so cool and
so interesting is that it truly is an international
collaboration. It's not just the United States. It's not just
NASA, it's also these other agencies and other countries
that are all working together towards the same goal, to try to
clean up air quality around the world.
Air quality is a problem around the world, especially in large
cities in the U.S. you think New York, LA, Chicago. In Asia, we
think Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok. In North America, we
have a satellite called TEMPO that looks continuously— that
satellite is doing its job. But there's also a satellite over
Asia called GEMS. GEMS is looking at Korea, Japan, China,
Philippines, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia. So you can
see the wide range of situations both in terms of what humans put
into the atmosphere, but also in terms of how the chemistry
proceeds, it's a very rich environment here in Asia to
study the science of air quality. Our
instruments, or, the one we're operating here is looking at
both particulates and ozone in the atmosphere. As we fly along
a track, we're looking from the aircraft all the way down to the
surface.
This is the best part of our job, getting to come out and
make the measurements. One of the things we're trying to do
with the aircraft is to really map out the vertical
distribution. So we have measurements from the ground. So
we get a good information right at the surface. And we have a
view from space, which NASA is definitely interested in. So
with the remote sensing that we have here, we get both, we get
the column measurements and the vertical profiles, along with
the DC-8, that's also doing a lot of vertical sampling with
highly detailed measurements. Our
job is to keep getting better, we're measuring more things from
the DC-8 than we've ever measured before. We're combining
two planes together in a way that's never been done before.
We're building models that can predict more accurately than
ever before. And we need those things because the atmosphere is
changing.
Seoul metropolitan area has a population of over 10 million
people, meaning people are sharing the air regardless of
their willingness. So the poor air quality means really
influential effects to many people. There are many entities
involved in this Asia AQ, from starting from a space agency
such as NASA and our Ministry of Environment in Korea, the
partnerships are most important because as scientists, we're
here to provide information. Yes, we do think air quality is
a problem. We do want to see it improve. But we're not the ones
who do that. If we want to see that happen, we have to
communicate what we're seeing to people who are in a position to
do something about that. My hope for this mission is that we will
be able to increase our understanding of how each
country faces air quality, what their challenges are, that we
make them better at their forecasting and predictability
of air quality and that we can pinpoint things that they can
prioritize in terms of improving problem. This
means a lot to us, because there are well over 500 people
involved in this campaign, including scientists from the
U.S. and Korea, and many other countries in Asia. For example,
we have have an outreach program that raises the public awareness
of this air quality, which will eventually lead up to the
politicians. I've been working on satellite remote sensing for
my scientist career, but the best thing about this type of
campaign is to have many different people gather
together, share their knowledge, and share their data to draw a
scientific conclusions on the air pollution events, and they
are evolutions