It could help expose racial and economic disparities.
“We’ve known that oil refineries or chemical plants tend to be situated in lower-income neighborhoods; one of the reasons the property values are lower is due to poor air quality. But we’ve never had ground-based monitors stationed in every neighborhood to confirm it,” John Haynes, TEMPO program applications lead at NASA, said in a March 30thTEMPO is supposed to help get rid of those blind spots.
Crucially, TEMPO will be aboard a satellite cruising along at the same rate as Earth’s rotation at a fixed spot over the equator. This is called geostationary orbit, and it’ll allow the instrument to take hourly measurements over North America for the first time. Before TEMPO, other satellites equipped with similar tools could typically only take measurements once a day.
TEMPO can also monitor pollution at a high resolution, down to 4 square miles . That’s how it’ll be able to see which neighborhoods have to deal with the most air pollution. Federal agencies, including the EPA, can also use that data in the future to issue more accurate air quality forecasts. It’ll take several more months after launch for the data from TEMPO to be available on Earth. The instrument should power up in late May or early June, and then it will take some more time to calibrate the instrument and validate its data.
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