A NASA initiative will see two aircraft perform between twelve and fourteen flights this July to see just how bad the air pollution is in Maryland. The project is called Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality (DISCOVER -- AQ).
A 117-foot P-3B NASA research aircraft will fly spirals over six ground stations and carry a suite of nine instruments, while a smaller two-engine UC-12 will carry two instruments. It will be part of a month-long field campaign designed to improve satellite measurements of air pollution.
James Crawford, the campaign’s principal investigator and a scientist based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, said that they were trying to fill the knowledge gap that severely limits our ability to monitor air pollution with satellites
Kenneth Pickering, DISCOVER-AQ’s project scientist said that they were better with some pollutants than others, but broadly speaking we have difficulty distinguishing between pollutants high in a given column of air, which we can see quite well with satellites, and pollutants at the surface.
This project will answer questions about the vertical distribution of pollutants. Researches will then be able to establish a 3D view of how air pollutants are distributed and move between the layers of the atmosphere during the day.