National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Air quality is a major health concern worldwide. To better understand this risk and mitigate its impact, accurate and timely air quality data are needed. A proposed method incorporating outputs of NASA’s GEOS Composition Forecasting (GEOS-CF) model system with satellite information from ESA’s TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) and ground measurement data from the EPA network in the continental United States is described.

The summer of 2021 is remarkable for a series of late-summer melt events that have covered large areas of the Greenland Ice Sheet, even extending to its highest point at Summit Station. These events have been captured in the GMAO Forward Processing (FP) analyses, and in routine numerical weather predictions produced from the GEOS forecast model.

An extreme heat wave occurred over much of the western US and southwestern Canada in late June 2021. We used daily and monthly near-surface temperature from MERRA-2 Reanalysis to compare the hot conditions of this year with the previous 40 years, particularly over the northwestern US that was severely affected.

GEOS FP shows the long-distance pollutant transport from Western N. American wildfires in July 2021.