Abstract
Abstract. The CHRONOS space mission concept provides time-resolved abundance for emissions and transport studies of the highly variable and highly uncertain air pollutants carbon monoxide and methane, with sub-hourly revisit rate at fine (∼ 4 km) horizontal spatial resolution across a North American domain. CHRONOS can provide complete synoptic air pollution maps (snapshots) of the continental domain with less than 10 min of observations. This rapid mapping enables visualization of air pollution transport simultaneously across the entire continent and enables a sentinel-like capability for monitoring evolving, or unanticipated, air pollution sources in multiple locations at the same time with high temporal resolution. CHRONOS uses a compact imaging gas filter correlation radiometer for these observations, with heritage from more than 17 years of scientific data and algorithm advances by the science teams for the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft in low Earth orbit. To achieve continental-scale sub-hourly sampling, the CHRONOS mission would be conducted from geostationary orbit, with the instrument hosted on a communications or meteorological platform. CHRONOS observations would contribute to an integrated observing system for atmospheric composition using surface, suborbital and satellite data with atmospheric chemistry models, as defined by the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites. Addressing the U.S. National Academy's 2007 decadal survey direction to characterize diurnal changes in tropospheric composition, CHRONOS observations would find direct societal applications for air quality management and forecasting to protect public health.
Highlights
For the end of the current decade, geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite missions for atmospheric composition are planned over North America, East Asia and Europe, with additional missions in formulation or proposed
From observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs), we have demonstrated that data assimilation of simulated CHRONOS multispectral observations of carbon monoxide (CO) significantly improves comparisons with the “true” surface CO values at EPA surface monitoring sites (Edwards et al, 2009)
It would deliver air pollutant measurements identified in the 2007 decadal survey GEO-CAPE mission (NRC, 2007) and address currently unmet science objectives described in the GEO-CAPE Science Traceability Matrix (Fishman et al, 2012)
Summary
For the end of the current decade, geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite missions for atmospheric composition are planned over North America, East Asia and Europe, with additional missions in formulation or proposed. In addition to NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution) mission (Zoogman et al, 2017), the ESA/EUMETSAT (European Space Agency/European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) Sentinel-4 mission over Europe (GMES-GAS, 2009) and the Korean KARI (Korea Aerospace Research Institute) MP-GEOSAT/GEMS (Multi-Purpose Geostationary Satellite/Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer) mission over Asia (Lee et al, 2010) will provide data products for ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), formaldehyde (HCHO) and aerosol optical depth (AOD) several times per day with smaller than 10 km × 10 km spatial footprints While these planned GEO measurements will provide new information. We show how CHRONOS would complement observations from other current and planned satellite instruments, and we conclude with a summary of CHRONOS features and advantages
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