TOMORROW: Media Briefing on Air Quality Research Flights (HQ)
WASHINGTON – EPA will participate in a media teleconference
hosted by NASA at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, June 23 to preview the
upcoming series of aircraft research flights over the
Baltimore-Washington traffic corridor to study urban air
pollution.
NASA research satellites monitor many
air pollution components, but it has been a challenge to use these
measurements of the atmosphere from space to detect pollution near
the ground. This multi-year airborne field campaign will help
improve the capability of satellites to measure near surface-level
atmospheric composition. EPA is partnering with NASA and several
other organizations on the effort.
The campaign is called DISCOVER-AQ,
which stands for Deriving Information on Surface Conditions from
Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air
Quality. It will use two NASA aircraft to make a series of flights
in July to measure gaseous and particulate pollution. Flights will
be coordinated with extensive ground observations at various sites
in Maryland extending from the Washington Beltway to northeast of
Baltimore.
The teleconference participants
are:
- Terry Keating, environmental scientist, EPA Office of Air and Radiation, Washington
- Jim Crawford, DISCOVER-AQ principal investigator, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
- Ken Pickering, DISCOVER-AQ project scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Dave J. Krask, atmospheric chemist, Maryland Department of the Environment, Baltimore, Md.