Societal and Economic Benefits of Geostationary Atmospheric Composition Measurements.

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) and Geostationary Extended Orbits (GeoXO) Atmospheric Composition Instrument (ACX) are the current and future geostationary atmospheric composition observatories over greater North America. Geostationary observations of atmospheric composition provide persistent, high spatial, and temporal measurements of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols and provide advantages over traditional sun-synchronous low-earth orbit instruments.

These new measurements provide hourly, high spatial resolution maps of air pollution, resulting in a common operating picture of our chemical weather. These environmental intelligence products elucidate how air pollution is created, and how it evolves, disperses, and transports over time scales of hours to days. This data has broad applicability resulting in economic, environmental, and human health benefits. Benefits include data driven tools to more closely link air pollution to public health, provide better air quality forecasts to minimize exposure for sensitive populations and alert hospitals and health clinics of location and time of severe air pollution events. State and local governments will have high resolution air pollution maps that will help them better plan sustainable economic development and complete cost/benefit trades of air pollution mitigation strategies. Users of emissions inventories will have more recent, timely data to feed airshed models, which will lead to more accurate model outputs.