A New Era of Air Quality Monitoring from Space over North America with TEMPO: Commissioning and Early Nominal Operation Results

We present an overview of the initial data products of TEMPO during its commissioning and early nominal operation and preliminary comparison with correlative satellite and ground-based observations.

TEMPO is NASA’s first Earth Venture Instrument (EVI) and first host payload. It measures hourly daytime atmospheric pollution over North America from Mexico City to the Canadian oil sands, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, at high spatiotemporal resolution (~10 km² at boresight) from the geostationary (GEO) orbit. It uses UV/visible spectroscopy (293-493 nm, 538-741 nm) to measure O₃ profiles including lower tropospheric O₃ and columns of NO₂, H₂CO, SO₂, C₂H₂O₂, H₂O, BrO, IO, as well as clouds aerosols, and UVB. TEMPO provides a tropospheric measurement suite that includes the key elements of tropospheric air pollution chemistry and captures the inherent high variability in the diurnal cycle of emissions and chemistry. The TEMPO instrument was built by Ball in 2018. It was integrated into the host commercial communication satellite Intelsat 40e (IS-40e) by Maxar. IS-40e was successfully launched on April 7 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on to the GEO orbit at 91°W. The TEMPO Instrument powered up for the first time on orbit in early June to start its commissioning. After a month of dry out and activation, TEMPO first light of solar and earth measurements occurred on July 31-August 2. TEMPO commissioning continues until early October. Nominal operation is expected to begin after the commissioning phase and the post-launch acceptance review. Science data products are archived and distributed at NASA’s ASDC and will be released to the public in approximately April 2024. TEMPO is part of a geostationary constellation to measure air quality along with GEMS (launched in Feb. 2020) over Asia and Sentinel-4 (to launch in 2024) over Europe.