Breathe Easier: Check Your Local Air Quality with TEMPO

Valuable air quality collected by the TEMPO mission is now being released to the public. TEMPO is a collaboration between SAO, NASA, and other partners.

The TEMPO instrument measured elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from a number of different areas and emission sources throughout the daytime on March 28, 2024. Yellow, red, purple, and black clusters represent increased levels of pollutants from TEMPO’s data and show drift over time. Credit: Trent Schindler/NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Air pollution data on a neighborhood scale are now available in near real-time from the TEMPO instrument (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). The mission gathers hourly daytime scans of the atmosphere over North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Coast and from roughly Mexico City to central Canada.

The primary instrument on TEMPO, a collaboration between NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), is an advanced spectrometer that detects pollution within the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

“TEMPOs data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution,”

said senior physicist Xiong Liu at SAO, a member of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), and principal investigator for TEMPO.

“For example, we will be able to conduct studies of rush hour pollution; linkages of diseases and health issues to acute exposure of air pollution; how air pollution inordinately impacts underserved communities; the potential…