Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution
Watching North American air quality
How does air pollution impact global weather and climate? Air pollution measurements from NASA’s TEMPO mission will give scientists the answer.
The TEMPO instrument, a geostationary ultraviolet/visible spectrometer, will provide daylight measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde and aerosols across North America, from Mexico City to Canada and from coast to coast. The instrument will be the first space-based ultraviolet/visible light air quality spectrometer in geostationary orbit.
NASA will partner with the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center in El Segundo, California, to employ their Hosted Payload Solutions (HoPS) contract to issue a request for proposals from commercial companies to provide satellite integration, launch services and ground operations for TEMPO. Flying on this commercial spacecraft, TEMPO will make observations from a geostationary vantage point, about 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator.
TEMPO's accurate air pollution measurements would allow scientists to predict the impact wildfire smoke may have on air quality in nearby cities.
What we’re doing
Instrument provider
TEMPO’s high resolution will allow pollution tracking at micro urban scales (an area approximating 1.25 x 2.8 miles) every hour and is expected to improve air quality prediction accuracy by 50 percent. The instrument was developed under a firm, fixed-price contract.
TEMPO was delivered to NASA on December 7, 2018. We developed the TEMPO instrument in tandem with the Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) in order to capture design efficiencies between the two instruments, which share the same technology. GEMS is a joint development effort by Ball and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), South Korea, and is the Asian element of a global air quality monitoring constellation that includes TEMPO.