The team from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and Manila Observatory (MO) meet the NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration aircrafts, NASA DC-8 and NASA G-III yesterday, February 5. 🚀
The NASA G-III serves as the aircraft for mapping and remote sensing, while NASA DC-8, known as the “flying science laboratory,” carries a payload of 26 instruments for sampling atmospheric composition ranging from gaseous compounds to meteorological variables.
The DENR team from its Environment Management Bureau (EMB Central Office) with MO, will join NASA in studying the atmosphere in Metro Manila and its surrounding regions through the ASIA-AQ (ASIAAQ24) mission.
Abstract
Conducted during February-March 2024, the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) assembled an international group of scientists to collect multi-perspective observations to investigate air quality and its controlling factors across four countries: the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. Research flights of NASA’s DC-8 and G-III research aircraft were carefully designed to allow integration of flight observations with local air quality monitoring networks and satellite observations from South Korea’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), as well as other satellites and surface research assets (e.g., super sites, Pandora spectrometers, and AERONET sunphotometers). This presentation will discuss the preparatory collaboration and work needed to enable the project, details of the execution of flights, data examples from each country, and plans for the project going forward. Given the immediate value of the observations, the team is working hard to provide Rapid Science Synthesis Reports for each country in early 2025, approximately one year after completion of research flights. These reports are intended to be useful for both policy makers and the public, pointing to early findings and evidence for air quality drivers and outcomes in the region.