The Pre-Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission

In 2010, NASA released "Responding to the Challenge of Climate and Environmental Change – NASA's Plan for a Climate-Centric Architecture for Earth Observations and Applications from Space”, which identified future mission and research plans in support of the Earth Science Division's goals and objectives. The Pre-Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission is part of this plan. PACE will make global ocean color measurements to provide extended data records on ocean ecology and global ocean biogeochemistry (e.g., carbon cycle), along with polarimetry measurements to provide extended data records on clouds and aerosols.

The PACE mission will extend key climate data records whose future was in jeopardy prior to the FY2011 budget request. An ocean color instrument will conduct global ocean color measurements, essential for understanding ocean ecology and the global carbon cycle and how it affects and is affected by climate change. These data will extend the high quality observations on ocean ecology, biogeochemical cycling, and ocean productivity begun by NASA in the late 1990s with the SeaWiFS and MODIS instruments. In addition, a polarimeter instrument is being considered to extend data records on aerosols and clouds using this approach begun by the French PARASOL mission, as well as multi-spectral and multi-angle measurements made by NASA's MODIS and MISR instruments on NASA's EOS platforms (MODIS on Terra and Aqua, MISR on Aqua).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) identified the largest uncertainty in our understanding of physical climate as that due to aerosols and clouds. New and continuing global observations of ocean ecology, biology, and chemistry are required to quantify aquatic carbon storage and ecosystem function in response to human activities and natural events. A key goal is improvement of climate-carbon and climate-ecology model prediction. The blend of atmospheric and oceanic requirements is critical as ocean biology is affected by deposition of aerosols onto the ocean, which in turn, produce aerosol precursors that influence climate.