Development of TEMPO Aerosol Detection Product

With the launch of TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution) on April 07, 2023, the hourly observations of ozone, fine particulate matter and their precursors from space over North America has become a reality. TEMPO, a UV-visible spectrometer instrument, makes hourly measurements with a wavelength coverage from 290-490 + 540-740 nm and a spatial resolution of about 4 x 7 km. At NOAA, we plan to generate a suite of aerosol products, including aerosol optical depth, single scattering albedo, aerosol layer height, absorbing aerosol index, and aerosol type (mainly, smoke and dust) from TEMPO observations including the synergy of ABI (Advanced Baseline Imager) observations from both GOES-East and GOES-West. In this paper, we focus on the approach of developing an aerosol detection product, including UV absorbing aerosol index (354nm/388nm) and visible aerosol index (410/440 nm). Both UV and Visible absorbing aerosol information are directly derived from TEMPO observations. For smoke/dust mask, we apply NOAA Enterprise aerosol detection algorithm, by synergistic combination of TEMPO UV-Visible observations with shortwave IR and IR observations from GOES-R ABI. A prototype of this approach was first developed using GEMS, a sister instrument of TEMPO and Advanced Himawari Instrument, a sister instrument of ABI. Our work shows that with the synergistic approach, we can detect plumes from Asian dust storm and smoke/smog outbreaks over China. The results are validated by using the ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) observations and Lidar measurements of Vertical Feature MASK product. Preliminary results from the application of the algorithm to TEMPO and ABI observations will also be presented.

Disclaimer: The scientific results and conclusions, as well as any views or opinions expressed herein, are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of NOAA or the Department of Commerce.