New Era of Air Quality Monitoring from Space: Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS)

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https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0013.1
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/26684

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9146-1632

Date

2020-01-01

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journal articles
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Citation of Original Publication

Kim, Jhoon, Ukkyo Jeong, Myoung-Hwan Ahn, Jae H. Kim, Rokjin J. Park, Hanlim Lee, Chul Han Song, Yong-Sang Choi, Kwon-Ho Lee, Jung-Moon Yoo, Myeong-Jae Jeong, Seon Ki Park, Kwang-Mog Lee, Chang-Keun Song, Sang-Woo Kim, Young Joon Kim, Si-Wan Kim, Mijin Kim, Sujung Go, Xiong Liu, Kelly Chance, Christopher Chan Miller, Jay Al-Saadi, Ben Veihelmann, Pawan K. Bhartia, Omar Torres, Gonzalo González Abad, David P. Haffner, Dai Ho Ko, Seung Hoon Lee, Jung-Hun Woo, Heesung Chong, Sang Seo Park, Dennis Nicks, Won Jun Choi, Kyung-Jung Moon, Ara Cho, Jongmin Yoon, Sang-kyun Kim, Hyunkee Hong, Kyunghwa Lee, Hana Lee, Seoyoung Lee, Myungje Choi, Pepijn Veefkind, Pieternel F. Levelt, David P. Edwards, Mina Kang, Mijin Eo, Juseon Bak, Kanghyun Baek, Hyeong-Ahn Kwon, Jiwon Yang, Junsung Park, Kyung Man Han, Bo-Ram Kim, Hee-Woo Shin, Haklim Choi, Ebony Lee, Jihyo Chong, Yesol Cha, Ja-Ho Koo, Hitoshi Irie, Sachiko Hayashida, Yasko Kasai, Yugo Kanaya, Cheng Liu, Jintai Lin, James H. Crawford, Gregory R. Carmichael, Michael J. Newchurch, Barry L. Lefer, Jay R. Herman, Robert J. Swap, Alexis K. H. Lau, Thomas P. Kurosu, Glen Jaross, Berit Ahlers, Marcel Dobber, C. Thomas McElroy, and Yunsoo Choi. "New Era of Air Quality Monitoring from Space: Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS)", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, 1 (2020): E1-E22, accessed Jan 11, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0013.1

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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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Abstract

The Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) is scheduled for launch in February 2020 to monitor air quality (AQ) at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution from a geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) for the first time. With the development of UV–visible spectrometers at sub-nm spectral resolution and sophisticated retrieval algorithms, estimates of the column amounts of atmospheric pollutants (O₃ , NO₂ , SO₂ , HCHO, CHOCHO, and aerosols) can be obtained. To date, all the UV–visible satellite missions monitoring air quality have been in low Earth orbit (LEO), allowing one to two observations per day. With UV–visible instruments on GEO platforms, the diurnal variations of these pollutants can now be determined. Details of the GEMS mission are presented, including instrumentation, scientific algorithms, predicted performance, and applications for air quality forecasts through data assimilation. GEMS will be on board the Geostationary Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite 2 (GEO-KOMPSAT-2) satellite series, which also hosts the Advanced Meteorological Imager (AMI) and Geostationary Ocean Color Imager 2 (GOCI-2). These three instruments will provide synergistic science products to better understand air quality, meteorology, the long-range transport of air pollutants, emission source distributions, and chemical processes. Faster sampling rates at higher spatial resolution will increase the probability of finding cloud-free pixels, leading to more observations of aerosols and trace gases than is possible from LEO. GEMS will be joined by NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) and ESA’s Sentinel-4 to form a GEO AQ satellite constellation in early 2020s, coordinated by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS).