NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA): Applications of NASA Satellite Data to Airborne Particulate Matter Exposure and Human Health

Abstract

The upcoming NASA Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) investigation seeks to extend NASA’s capabilities to study the impact of different size and compositional mixtures of particulate matter (PM) on adverse health outcomes. The MAIA satellite instrument, in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and planned for launch in mid-2022, will collect multiangular, multispectral, and polarimetric measurements over a set of globally distributed target areas. Retrievals of aerosol properties will be combined with ground-based monitor data and chemical transport modeling to produce 1-km gridded data products of daily-averaged PM10 and PM2.5 mass, as well as the fractional abundances of sulfate, nitrate, organic carbon, elemental carbon, and dust making up the retrieved PM2.5 mixtures. Epidemiologists on the MAIA Science Team and their collaborators will use these data in studies aimed at associating health risk with particle types. The MAIA Early Adopters Program is designed to engage the wider air quality and public health communities and assist them in using MAIA data products, which will be publicly available, free of charge, from NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center. This presentation will cover the plans for operational MAIA data products as well as test data products that will be available prior to launch, and opportunities for Early Adopters to become involved in the program.